Objectives and Guidelines for Establishing Mega Food Parks
The primary objective of establishing Mega Food Parks is to provide modern infrastructure facilities for the food processing along the value chain from farm to market with a cluster based approach based on a hub and spokes model. It includes creation of infrastructure for primary processing and storage near the farm in the form of Primary Processing Centres (PPCs) and Collection Centres (CCs) and common facilities and enabling infrastructure like roads, electricity, water, ETP facilities etc. at Central Processing Centre (CPC). These PPCs and CCs act as aggregation and storage points to feed raw material to the processing units located in the CPC. These are demand-driven projects and would facilitate food processing units to meet environmental, safety and social standards. Each Mega Food Park is likely to attract investment of about Rs. 100 Crore in common facilities and leverage an additional investment of about Rs. 250 Crore. Expected annual turnover of each MFP is about Rs. 500 Crore. It is likely to benefit about 6000 farmers/ producers directly and 25000-30000 farmers indirectly.
Out of the total 40 (Forty) Mega Food Parks approved for setting up in the country, 23 (Twenty Three) Parks have been accorded Final Approval and are at various stages of implementation. Of these, 5 (Five) Mega Food Parks, one each at Haridwar (Uttarkhand), Chittoor (Andhra Pradesh), Fazilka (Punjab), Tumkur (Karnataka) and Nalbari (Assam) have become operational. Remaining 17 Mega Food Park projects have been accorded In-principle approval and are in the process of meeting conditions of Final approval.
Report of the evaluation of impact of the Scheme of Mega Food Parks recently submitted by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) indicates that overall socio-economic impact of the operational Mega Food Parks for catchment area is highly positive. Setting up these Parks has resulted in reduction of wastage of agricultural and horticultural produce through increased sourcing from farmers, increase in their shelf-life through primary processing like, sorting, grading etc., better storage, availability of other modern common infrastructure facilities and value addition through food processing, benefit to the farmers by enhanced level of procurement, realisation of better prices of produce, elimination/reduction in the layers of the middle-men, training and technology transfer, benefit to Industry by helping in value addition by providing modern common infrastructure facilities, induction of advanced technology and exporting opportunities, benefit to local population through full/partial direct and indirect employment generation, benefit to traders through increase in product range and better quality and to consumers through availability of better products at lesser price.
Expression of Interest (EoI) had been invited by the Government on 10.02.2014 for setting up Mega Food Parks in the country with the last date of 31.07.2014. In response, total 72 proposals had been received from various States. These proposals have been appraised by observing a thorough and transparent procedure and based upon the merit, 15 selected proposals have been accorded In-principle approval on 31.03.2015.
This information was given by the Minister of State for Food Processing Industries Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti in a written reply in Rajya Sabha.
Collection from PIB
