LAHORE, Oct 28: Owner of a local restaurant, who manufactured the first automatic plant for preparing subsidised roti in the city, has been waiting for the city district government’s patronage to use his invention for the benefit of people.

Installed near the Regal Cinema, the plant had in the first week of September started operation on an experimental basis. With the capacity to produce 6,000 pieces of roti or naan, each weighing 100 grams, in an hour on an average, the ‘Regal Roti Plant’ was to sell roti at Rs2 and naan at Rs4 a piece even after the Ramazan.

District Coordination Officer Sajjad Ahmad Bhutta inspected the plant on Sept 17 and appreciated it for the weight and standard of roti.

Welcoming the gesture of plant owner, Rahmat Ali, for joining the CDGL’s efforts to provide subsidised roti to the people round the clock, the DCO had expressed the desire to install smaller units in other urban areas and katchi abadis of Lahore as well.

Rahmat Ali manufactured a smaller automatic plant that could produce up to 1,200 rotis in an hour on an average.

He also added automatic units that could knead 160 kilo of flour within 10 to 12 minutes and make up to 3,000 flour balls in an hour.

Ironically, the plant could not be operated to its capacity even during the holy month because only 10 to 20 bags of subsidised flour were supplied to the plant.

“The big unit at Regal requires at least 500 bags daily while the smaller one can make breads of 250 flour sacks of 20-kilo each in a day,” maintained Rahmat while adding that one-hour output of the smaller unit was equivalent to seven-hour functioning of a traditional earthen oven with less wastage and minimum chances of over or under baking the bread.

Furthermore, owing to lesser involvement of humans, the roti baked at the automatic plant is more hygienic.

“What I need is a pat on the back. Provide me space anywhere in Lahore, I will pay the rent, install plant there, and at a later stage can even supply roti weighing 115 to 125 grams at Rs2 a piece, subject to adequate availability of subsidised flour.

“Bhutta Sahib (DCO) visited the plant three or four times during Ramazan and every time I asked him to request the chief minister to formally inaugurate the plant at Regal, besides provision of space in other areas for the installation of smaller units, but have yet to get a positive response in this regard,” said Rahmat.