Emerging Mega Food Parks in India

Cleaning & Maintenance of the MFPs post completion

Post completion, the cleaning and maintenance programme is yet in the formulation stage. During an ICRIER’s survey, one of the SPVs said that for maintaining the food park, the company is planning to create an association of units within the food park, which will undertake all maintenance work. It will operate like a cooperative association and the SPV will continue to maintain the park.

The MoFPI pointed out that a short duration MoA will be signed with the SPV and once the grant is totally disbursed or the MoA ceases to exist, the future of the MFPs will be in the hands of the SPV. It is the discretion of SPV to continue running the facility as a food park or converting it to some other use. The MoFPI is responsible until full grant is disbursed and it meets its commitment as under the 11th Five Year Plan.

The total investments in all these food parks are estimated at about Rs 5,000 crore, of which the Union government’s share in terms of infrastructure development will be around Rs 2,100 crore. The total turnover of 42 food parks is estimated at Rs 21,000 crore.

Working closely with MoFP on various MFPs, Ritwik Bahuguna, Director & Partner-NAPL Advisors Pvt Ltd says, “The three operational food parks – Patanjali Food and Herbal Park, Hardwar-Uttrakhand; India Food Park (IFP), Tumkur-Karnataka and International Mega Food Park Ltd, Fazilka-Punjab – do have mechanised cleaning, mostly in-house. As far as cleaning & hygiene is concerned, they do maintain the best of hygiene standards a food processing company can have.” Thus, requiring a complete professional cleaning and maintenance plan.

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NEMFPL

North East Mega Food Park Ltd. (NEMFPL) is a JV of PSUs – Assam Industrial Development Corporation & Assam Small Industry Development Corporation and Private parties – Ozone Ayurvedics, Rajshekhar Constructions Pvt. Ltd and Prajakta Technology Pvt. Ltd with Ozone group being the largest stake holder to the tune of about 69%. The Mega Park houses common facility building (17,000sqm), dry warehouse (5,900sqm), standard design factory (3,400sqm) and cold storage. The infrastructure includes well-constructed road, drainage, water, 10 MVA/33KV power line, effluent/sewerage treatment plant, administrative centre, trade facilitation centre, health care centre, commercial centre, banking, weighing bridge, fire hydrant system, common infrastructure like pre-cooling chamber, quality testing laboratories for testing of food materials and finished products.

“Fresh farm produce will be collected at collection centres and transported to Primary Processing Centres where they will be sorted, graded, washed and packed. Then the produce will be transported to the fresh market or to CPC through a fleet of reefer trucks and vans with variable temperature control features. We can introduce SHGs (Self Help Groups) in backward linkages,” informs Ronn Pakrashi, COO, NEMFPL, Guwahati.

Operations and Maintenance

Speaking about the O&M activities at NEMFPL, Ronn explains, “As NE Food Park operations are still in the nascent stage with only one dehydration unit that has come up, we have two supervisors at our site looking after the entire maintenance. As of now, no annual budget has been fixed for cleaning & maintenance activities. We will provide common facilities and services to the units housed in Food Park on a nominal charge basis, which will be decided soon. At present, no mechanised cleaning is introduced, but we are looking to procure some machines when a few more units become operational in our park.”

To curb contamination, individual units will have to take care of cleaning & hygiene of the area within their premises. For the overall cleaning & hygiene of the park, well defined and systematic measures would , the first six months OEM is with the company, which is setting up the WWTP.

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Waste Management

The first guidelines (2009) of MFP scheme mention that one of the major objectives of the scheme has been to facilitate the implementation of Vision 2015‘, which envisaged an increase value addition from 20 to 35 per cent by 2015.

During ICRIER’s survey, some farmers mentioned that MFP had led to value addition of around 20% in places like Chittor, which supply mangoes to Srini Mega Food Park. The scheme guidelines mention reduction in wastage as one of the important objectives and the MFPs can lead to reduction of wastage through two channels:

• Reduction in agriculture wastage from farmers through increased sourcing from farmers; better storage facilities and providing common infrastructure facilities.
• Reduction in wastage resulting from the food processing through using the waste in other products or for making fuel or gas.