Ministry of Food Processing and Industries announces 17 new Mega Food Parks

The Dollar Business Bureau The Ministry of Food Processing and Industries, announced setting up of 17 new Mega Food Parks (MFPs) acroos the country. The announcement came after earlier projects for setting up of these facilities were withdrawn. Out of these 17 fresh MFPs, seven projects will be approved by State government agencies from six States and the rest are expected to be taken up by private operators. In the total project cost that stands at Rs 2333 crore, the government’s grant is likely to be around Rs 850 crore and promoters’ contribution as equity and loan is around Rs 1,483 crore. This was informed by Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Union Minister of State for Food Processing Industries on Tuesday. The financial assistance for setting up of the MFPs is provided at 50% of the total project cost in general areas, 75% of project cost in the North-East region and around Rs 50,000 crore per project in the hilly terrain and areas under Integrated Tribal Development Programme (ITPB). For the MFPs, aimed at providing modern infrastructure to the development of food processing sector, the infrastructure is being created for primary processing and storage near the farm in the form of Primary Processing Centres (PPCs) and Collection Centres (CCs) located in production areas, the Minister informed. These PPCs and CCs will act as storage points to provide raw material to the processing centres located at the Central Processing Centre (CPC). Common facilities and the key infrastructure including the modern warehousing, cold storage, sorting, packaging, pulping, ripening chambers and tetra packaging, among others will be created at the CPC for the food parks to be set up, the Minister informed. So far the government has sanctioned 42 MFPs to be setup across the country, aimed at creation of modern infrastructure facilities for the country’s food processing industries. Of the total 42 MFPs, 21 MFPs have got the final approval by the Ministry of Food Processing and are at various stages of completion and the four MFPs at Chittoor (AP), Haridwar (Uttarakhand), Fazilka (Punjab) and Tumkur (Karnataka) are at an operational stage.    

This article was published on April 21, 2015 – 7:30 pm IST.