Food Processing sector is all set to become one of the most robust sectors in India, contributing to India’s growth. Further, the sector is all set to help doubling farmers’ income by 2022. According to the Union Minister for Food Processing Industries Harsimrat Kaur Badal, earlier, food processing sector was totally disorganised and the industry was apprehensive of launching new projects or products and committed projects were being delayed and shelved. Now, the sector has received investment commitments of nearly Rs
1,00,000 crore in last one year alone and out of which investments worth Rs 73,000 crore have started grounding.
“The last government sanctioned 42 mega food parks from year 2008 onwards and six years later when I took over, only two (one of them Patanjali) could get operationalised during 2008 to 2014. I can now proudly say that overall 25 mega food parks would be operationalised by 2018. Out of these 25 food parks, 15 have already been completed so far and 15 more shall be operationalised by 2019,” said the minister.
Government is creating a Cold Chain Grid to link every nook and corner of India by its 42 Mega Food Parks, 234 Cold Chain Projects and around 700 projects under PM Kisan Sampada Yojana. With the schemes of the Ministry, more than 33 lakh farmers shall be directly benefited every year. Moreover, the Minister informed, “We are in the process to create a new Financial Institution that will exclusively fund food processing projects and create capacity building in the field of risk assessment and lending to food processing sector. Request for proposal for the institution which will be called Agro Processing Financial
Institution, will be out by July, 2018. It will be a Non-Banking Financial Institution and will be largely driven by private sector and government will act as a facilitator. There is a keen interest in the institution by both national and international companies.”
Last four years have witnessed 351 per cent mega increase in preservation and processing capacity of 15.94 lakh MT per annum created by the Ministry. Big-time increase of 720 per cent in cold storage capacity. 180 per cent increase in the value of agro produce processed by the projects handled by the Ministry.
Under the new Scheme Pradhan Mantri Kisan SAMPADA Yojana, total of 122 projects have been approved under three schemes viz. Agro Processing Clusters, Backward-Forward Linkage and Unit scheme leveraging an investment of Rs 2,300 crore. This is expected to generate direct and indirect employment of around 3.4 lakh persons.
