“The govt. needs to direct 10-15% budgetary allocation towards storage of produce and cold chain logistic”
Mr Chandrakant Patel, CMD, Ice Make Refrigeration Limited urged
the Finance Minister Mrs Nirmala Sitharaman to
direct at least 10-15% of the budgetary allocation towards developing an
effective ecosystem for proper storage of produce and cold chain infrastructure.
India is short by 25 million tonnes of cold storage capacity and over 60,000
refrigerated trucks and there is an urgent need to fill this huge capacity gap.
He says “The government needs to do a lot more to fuel
agricultural growth and treat the root cause behind India’s poverty and urban
rural divide. The main challenge is providing skills and economic opportunity
to rural India. India needs to save
nearly Rs l lakh crore of nation’s money which is lost due to wastage of
produce, by building proper storage capacities. Proper storage
facilities can help agriculture and allied activities be lucrative and encourage
people to continue farming. We need to prevent harvest and post-harvest
losses which makes the farming less lucrative. Pre and post harvest losses were estimated at
about Rs 92,651 crore in 2016-17, which is a huge loss to the farmers and the
economy year after year.
This wastage is due to gaps in the cold chain such as
poor infrastructure, insufficient cold storage capacity, unavailability of cold
storages in proximity to farms and weak transportation infrastructure. Every year, farmers make such a huge
loss for not being able to sell their produces for which they make investments
as per their capacity. Just to make sense of this staggering figure: This
amounts to 70 per cent of the investment required for making available
cold-chain infrastructures essential for avoiding post-harvest losses.
The FM has allocated 1.3 trillion rupees to the agriculture
sector to spur the growth. We believe this budgetary
allocation would lay strong foundation for the next generation of
agricultural reforms that can transform the rural economy, create more jobs and
boost demand. To re-energies the rural economy, the
government has been trying to bring in various policy reforms like model code
farming, e-markets, incubation of the zero budget farming,
emphasis on the skilling of workers, setting up of 10,000 Farmer Producer
Organizations (FPOs), encouraging private entrepreneurship, increased public
expenditure on developing agri-infra like micro-irrigation, cold storage
capacity building and a national warehouse grid which are all welcome steps, He
said
In our capacity as a
key player in cold chain business Ice Make Refrigeration Limited which is one
of the leading manufacturer & supplier of cooling solutions equipment, has
started manufacturing of an affordable
solar powered cold storage unit for interior areas where proper storage
temperature and adequate
infrastructure is not available due to non -availability of regular
power. With the growth and popularity of Farmer Producer Organizations, we
expect the demand for solar cold storage units to increase. These units with 40-50% government subsidy and easy access to credit facility
make them affordable and can generate additional economic opportunity, investment
and employment in the agriculture sector. These storage units
can provide competitive edge to the FPOs (Farmer Producer Organizations)
and increase their bargaining capacity in the open market. The government should create awareness and
encourage them invest in cold storage facilities and have better negotiation
power with large buyers, he added
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