To help the farmers to add value to their produce and preserve food items, the Central Government will establish 42 mega food parks with cluster-based approach in a phased manner which in turn will help to prevent wastage and damage especially of perishable items.
The Union Ministry of Food Processing Industry has invited proposals from the potential investors to setup six mega food parks in the country by September 15 and priority will be accorded to the uncovered States, announced the Minister in-charge Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Tuesday.
She said under the reformulated mega food parks scheme, the Union Government had already approved 42 such parks under eleventh and twelfth plan projects.
“The main objective of this scheme is to provide modern infrastructure facilities for the food processing along the value chain from the farm to the market which would include creation of processing infrastructure near the farm, transportation, logistics and centralized processing centers,” she said.
Elaborating further, Bathinda MP said that smaller “food parks” would also be setup under ‘SAMPADA’ scheme in the country having cold storage facilities thereby help in preservation of food items on a larger scale.
Moving toward ‘zero wastage’, she informed that in the past two years, the Ministry had created infrastructure capacity worth Rs 9,000 crore to process 32 lakh tonnes of perishable fruits and vegetables and reduce wastage by 10 per cent a year.
She said that on an average, each mega food project would have around 30-35 medium food processing units with a collective investment of around Rs 250 crore that would eventually lead to an annual turnover of about Rs 450-500 crore and creation of direct employment of 2,500 persons and indirect employment of about 30,000 people.