May 11, Colombo (LNW):The government has planned to set up an environmentally friendly industrial zone adjacent to the Kankesanthurai cement factory.
The current landmark investments include the Kankesanthurai cement factory site which is being converted into an industrial zone and information Technology University will be set up in partnership with the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT) and a foreign private investment.
Sri Lanka is in talks with Canada-based entrepreneurs of Sri Lanka origin to build a 500 million dollar industrial park in Kankesanthurai in the Jaffna peninsula, State Minister for Investment Promotion Dilum Amunugama said.
The industrial park will be built on 700 acres by a defunct state-run cement factory.The investors will invest 500 million dollars to build infrastructure in the land given by the Board of Investment under a private public partnership model.
The Canadian entrepreneurs will build roads and other infrastructure and will attract investors into the zone to recover their costs.
The zone operators have the choice of also constructing buildings and offering plug-and-play factories.“It is entirely up to them,” Minister Amunugama said. “They can build factories or offer bare land.”
The defunct cement factory only has limestone in about 100 acres which will not be sufficient to sustain a cement factory for a long time, he said.
There was at one time about 500 acres of limestone but now settlements have come up and it was not practical to move people out of the area.
However, if an investor was willing to revive the factory with a smaller extent of limestone, the choice was left to them, Minister Amunugama said.
The Lanka Cement factory at Kankesanthurai (‘KKS Factory’) was a pioneering northern industrial development project in the post-independent era.
The KKS Factory commenced in 1950 under the Department of Industries and was converted to a public corporation in 1956, named Kankesan Cement Works.
The KKS factory closed its production in 1991 due to the then raging northern war. At the time of its closure, its production capacity was 115,000 MT and around 400 factory employees lost their livelihoods when it ceased operations.
Existence of limestone deposits in Kankesanthurai for cement production was a major incentive in establishing the factory in KKS.
It is reported that the huge limestone deposits exceeding 80 million MT in the area is sufficient for the manufacturing of cement for another 100 years – even if they are extracted at a rate of 3,500 MT a day.
