Ahmadpur, Birbhum

AMODPUR is a town in the Suri Sadar subdivision of Birbhum district in the Indian state of West Bengal. Ahmedpur is a village panchayat under Sainthia panchayat of Birbum Zilla Parishad. The town is well known in the area for its sugar mill and as one end of the vintage narrow gauge railway. The office of the Block Development Officer, Sainthia Block is situated here, adjacent to the Ahmedpur railway station. It hosts a growing local business centre, being well connected with Kolkata and other cities of West Bengal via railway.GeographyAhmedpur is located in the alluvial plain of the Mayurakshi River. It has hot and dry summers, spread between March and May, followed by the monsoon from June to September. Seventy-eight percent of the rainfall occurs during this period.Ahmedpur Sugar MillThe West Bengal government purchased the assets of the erstwhile National Sugar Mills (in liquidation) through a court sale on 4 June 1973, providing an instrument to the West Bengal Sugar Industries Development Corporation to achieve its objective of promoting and developing sugar industry, and also ensuring protection of employment in the closed mill. After the Corporation took possession of the mill on 1 September 1973, it was renamed “Ahmedpur Sugar Mill”. It went into production in the 1974-75 season. It has a crushing capacity of 600 tonnes per day. It procures sugarcane from the area comprising whole of Birbhum District, part of Bardhaman, Nadia and its captive farms in the district of Murshidabad, covering a distance over 25 km to 130 km from the mill gate. However, the scattered situation at a far off distance from the mill is preventing it from purchase of optimum quantity of sugarcane for crushing by paying exorbitant transport charge. As a result of the peculiar difficulties for downscale plantations of sugarcane in Birbhum district and insufficient source of sugarcane from other zones, the working results of the mill for the above seasons became dismal. This sugar mill has not been functioning for around 7–10 years.