OREANDA-NEWS. April 22, 2015. The Ministry has announced selection of 17 new Mega Food Parks against the vacancies caused due to withdrawal or cancellation of the projects selected earlier. Out of these 17 (Seventeen) new Mega Food Parks, 7 (Seven) projects have been approved for State Government Agencies from 6 (Six) States and 10 (Ten) projects have been approved for private promoters. The financial assistance for setting up Mega Food Parks is provided @ 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. The total estimated proposed project cost of these 17 projects is Rs. 2333 crore out of which the Government grant is likely to be around Rs. 850 crore and promoters’ contribution as equity and loan is around Rs. 1483 crore.

Mega Food Parks aim at creating modern infrastructure for development of food processing sector which helps in reduction in wastage of perishables, value addition to the agricultural produce, providing better price to farmers and creation of employment opportunities especially in rural areas. Mega Food Parks function on a cluster based approach based on a hub and spokes model. Infrastructure is 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. These PPCs and CCs act as aggregation and storage points to feed raw material to the processing units located in the Central Processing Centre (CPC). Common facilities and enabling infrastructure like modern warehousing, cold storage, IQF, sorting, grading, packaging, pulping, ripening chambers and tetra packaging units, roads, electricity, water, ETP facilities etc. are created at CPC for food processing units to be set up in the Park.

The Government has sanctioned setting up of 42 (Forty Two) Mega Food Parks for creation of modern infrastructure for food processing industries in the country. Out of these, 21 (Twenty One) Parks have been accorded Final Approval by the Ministry and are at various stages of implementation. Four Mega Food Parks at Haridwar (Uttarkhand), Chittoor (Andhra Pradesh), Fazilka (Punjab) and Tumkur (Karnataka) have become operational. The other projects, which have been accorded In-principle approval, are in the process of meeting the conditions of final approval as per the scheme guidelines.

This information was given by the Minister of State for Food Processing Industries, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha here today.