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Mega Food Parks
Mega Food Parks. The Mega Food Parks Scheme aims to provide a mechanism to bring together farmers, processors and retailers and link agriculture production to the market so as to ensure maximization of value addition, minimization of wastages and improving farmers’ income.
The Mega Food Parks Scheme aims to provide a mechanism to bring together farmers, processors and retailers and link agriculture production to the market so as to ensure maximization of value addition, minimization of wastages and improving farmers’ income. The scheme was originally launched as the 2008 Food Parks Scheme (FPS). The objective of this scheme was to raise the processing of perishables in the country from the existing 6% to 20% and increase value addition from 20% to 35%.
Further, its objective was to increase the share of India in the global food trade from 1.5% to 3% by the year 2015. The scheme targets 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 food processing units located in the CPC. Food Processing being a capital-incentive activity, common facilities are created at CPC to be used by the processing units on hire basis. The minimum land required for a CPC in Mega Food Park is 50 acres and implementation period is 30 months. The scheme is demand-driven and would facilitate food processing units to meet environmental, safety and social standards.
A cluster of 30-35 units is expected to come up in one Mega Food Park with an investment of about Rs 250 Crore. It is likely to benefit about 6000 farmers/ producers directly and 25,000-30,000 farmers indirectly. The financial assistance under the scheme is provided in the form of grant-in-aid @ 50% of eligible project cost in general areas and @ 75% of eligible project cost in NE Region and difficult areas (Hilly States and ITDP areas) subject to maximum of Rs 50 crore per project.
Functioning of Mega Food Parks is closely monitored by the Ministry through a well-established mechanism as per the scheme guidelines. This includes detailed scrutiny of the periodical progress reports of the project by the Programme Management Agency (PMA) and the Ministry. A total of 42 Mega Food Parks have been sanctioned by the Central government so far and currently, 25 projects are under implementation.
