NEW MEGA FOOD PARK ANNOUNCED

 

Union Food Processing Industries Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Thursday laid the foundation stone of Pristine mega food park at Khagaria in Bihar, stressing the need to set-up at least one mega food park in each state with the aim to provide direct and indirect employment to about 6,000 people and benefit about 30,000 farmers .The ministry also accorded the status of designated food parks to three more food processing industries in Odisha. These are Agro Industrial Estate for maize, Nabarangpur, Jagatpur industrial estate in Cuttack and Mancheswar industrial estate in Bhubaneswar. Earlier in June 2015 MITS mega Food Park, Khordha mega Food Park and sea Food Park at Deras (all in Odisha) were given this status. With this the number of Food Parks in Odisha has now gone to six. These parks will have modern infrastructure like roads, electricity, STP, ETP and administrative building and will be eligible to access concessional credit from the Rs 2,000 crore fund available with NABARD.

MEGA FOOD PARK

1) Mega Food Park Scheme is the flagship program of the Ministry of Food Processing Industries, Government of India and a setup in 12th Five year plan.

2) The Mega Food Park is an inclusive concept which is aimed at establishing direct linkages from the farm to processing and on to the consumer markets, through a network of collection centres and Primary Processing Centres.

3) Government will give them grant to cover 50% of project cost for the general areas and 75% to North East, Hill area, areas under integrated Tribal development plan.

4) It aims to promote processing of intermediate products, to carter cutting edge technologies and testing facilities.

5) General Budget 2014-15 centre had announced setting up of a special fund of Rs 2,000 crore in NABARD to provide affordable credit to agro-processing units being designated as food parks.

6) While it will help in providing basic infrastructure such as road-road connectivity, electricity, telecom-internet, dry and temperature controlled warehouses, ripening chambers, reefer vans etc. primarily , it will also focus  on supply chain management, logistics etc.

7) Central government has recently announced to set 42 Mega Food Parks in coming four years.

NABARD 1) The bank came into existence on 12 July 1982 by a special act by the parliament. 2) Its mission is to “Promote sustainable and equitable agriculture and rural prosperity through effective credit support, related services, institution development and other innovative initiatives”. 3) It has headquarters based in Mumbai  and other branches are all over the country. 4) It regulates the institution which provides financial help to the rural economy and refinances the financial institutions which finances the rural sector. 5) It provides training facilities to the institutions working in the field of rural upliftment 6) NABARD also has a portfolio of Natural Resource Management Programmes involving diverse fields like Watershed Development, Tribal Development and Farm Innovation through dedicated funds set up for the purpose..    Author: Palak Tiwari, a freelancer writer based in Bhopal Start your IAS Preparation today itself