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Amul to invest Rs 250 crore in Sankrail food park in West Bengal
KOLKATA: Amul-owned Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation is planning to set up a Rs 250 crore dairy processing plant at Sankrail in West Bengal.
Additionally, Amul has planned an investment of Rs 5,000-crore for expansion of its own milk processing capacities in the next two to three years.
“The new modern plant at Sankrail food park will cost us Rs 250 crore with optimum processing capacity of 15 lakh litres per day,” Amul managing director RS Sodhi said.
The plant, which will come up on 16 acres of land at the food park, is expected to be operational in the next 15 months.
Amul will be manufacturing fresh milk products, ice cream and beverages in the plant, Sodhi said.
“Currently, Amul operates three plants in Kolkata on contractual basis with a total processing capacity of 7,25,000 litres of milk per day,” Sodhi said. “Milk collection for Kolkata and adjoining markets would be increased from local farmers, which accounts for just one-third of its milk requirement,” he added.
Makers of Amul branded milk and dairy products will establish 10 new processing units in different regions of the country, he said talking about the company’s national plan.
In tune with global milk price crash this fiscal, the milk prices in the country remained depressed. When being asked about the probable price hike, he said, “We have had our last price hike in May last year. This year prices may rise by around five per cent in tandem with inflation.”
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Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
