In the pursuant of Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s budgetary announcement for the year 2013-14 and also in the line of meeting requirements under the Food Security Act, the National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARAD) has introduced scheme for providing direct loan for building warehouses. The central scheme has been prepared with a corpus of Rs 5000 crore.
The scheme, titled as ‘NABARD Warehousing Scheme’, would envisage direct loans to public and private sector for construction of warehouses, silos, cold storages and cold chain infrastructure throughout the county with special focus on the eastern States including Jharkhand. “Funds under this scheme would be utilised for meeting the growing demand for storage capacity for agricultural commodities in the entire country and also in the wake of enactment of National Food Security Act 2013,” said a senior official of the bank.
loans will be provided for projects involving creation of storage infrastructure with a minimum capacity of 5000 metric tons (MT). Storage infrastructure projects of State Governments, State Government undertakings, SPVs set up under PPP mode, Cooperatives, Federations, State level boards, apex marketing boards, bodies, panchayats, private companies and private entrepreneurs etc will be provided loans from this scheme. The warehouses and cold storages created from this scheme will have to be compliant to Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority (WDRA) norms, said the official.
The scheme can be effectively utilised for reducing the storage gap in Jharkhand that is set to increase after massive amount of food slated to come to meet nearly 80 per cent of the population. The initiative is to ensure proper scientific storage of agriculture commodities. It is expected that about 10 MMT of additional modern storage would be created in the country with this. Farmers would also be benefited in terms of better price realisation and post harvest loans.