Choosing a Site for a Co-operative Sugar Factory
A taluka in Maharashtra's black-soil cotton belt gets about 640 mm of rain, almost all between June and September. A co-operative wants a sugar factory crushing 2,500 tonnes of cane a day; cane must be crushed within 24 hours of cutting or its sucrose content falls and farmers are paid less. Three sites are on the table. Site A: 12 km from 8,000 hectares of cane, on the highway, 4 km from the Bhima river, on level ground, 18 km from the railhead. Site B: 25 km from the cane area, beside the railway, 2 km from a market town of 60,000 people, but on land that stood under 1.5 m of water in 1998, 2005 and 2019. Site C: 3 km from the cane, but on a slope of 1 in 12 and 30 km from the railhead; its approach road crosses a stream that runs dry by January. The board has Rs 40 crore and one chance.
1. Rank the three sites and justify your first choice.
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Rank the criteria by what the factory cannot survive without: cane freshness, water, power, level land, transport of the finished product, labour.
Site A should be chosen. It is close to the cane, beside a perennial river for the large volumes of water that crushing needs, and on level ground that requires no heavy earthwork. Its weakness, the 18 km to the railhead, is mild because sugar is non-perishable and loses almost nothing in weight over that distance.
Site B is second on paper and third in practice. Rail and a market town are real advantages, but the site has flooded three times in 21 years, most recently in 2019. A factory is fixed capital; a repeat flood is not an insurance problem but an existential one, and the crushing season coincides with the monsoon.
Site C is worst. A 1 in 12 slope means costly cut-and-fill, poor drainage, and an approach road cut by a stream precisely during the crushing months.
2. What single piece of missing information would most change your answer, and why?
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Several gaps exist, but one dominates: the reliability of the 8,000 hectares figure for cane.
Cane is a 12 to 18 month crop and its area swings with last year's price. If much of that 8,000 hectares is currently cotton, Site A's chief advantage shrinks sharply, because 2,500 tonnes a day for a full season needs a large, committed and irrigated command area, not a nominal one. A weaker area would make Site B's rail access and town labour more attractive, or even argue for a smaller plant.
The next most important gap is groundwater at Site A. A river 4 km away is not water at the gate; if the factory must pipe it and the taluka is already under stress, the cost picture changes.
Notice what does not change the answer: land price and the distance to the railhead. Neither can outweigh a site that floods or a site that cannot be reached in July.
3. Why should distance to cane matter more than distance to the railway?
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Because of what is being moved, not how far.
Cane is a weight-losing and perishable raw material. A tonne of cane yields roughly 100 kg of sugar, a few tens of kilos of molasses, and a large quantity of bagasse and water. Transporting cane long distances means paying freight on water and fibre that will be discarded, and every hour of delay lowers the recovery rate. A factory 25 km away is therefore losing money on every truck, while a factory 12 km away is not.
Sugar is the opposite: compact, stable and storable. Moving it 18 km by road to a railhead adds a small cost to a product that is about a tenth of the original weight.
The same logic places the factory near the cane and the market near the consumer. The map question is really a question about weight loss at each stage, which is why Site C's 3 km to the fields cannot rescue it if the approach road is cut.