India needs to promote food processing sector to achieve the goal of doubling farmers’ income by 2022: Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti

New Delhi, May 23 (KNN) To achieve the goal of doubling farmers' income by 2022, India needs to promote food processing sector, said Minister of State for Food Processing Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti.

Speaking on the need to strengthen food processing sector, she said “the government aims to double the farmers' income by 2022 but we won't be able to achieve that goal until we uplift and promote the food processing sector which is also important to provide pure food to consumers, create employment opportunities for people and provide fair price to farmers for their produce.”

Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti made the following remarks while inaugurating the ASSOCHAM National Conference on cold chain technologies, convergence and capacity building.

Pointing towards government initiative in this direction, she said that the government is working towards linking its goal of doubling farmer’s income with the need to promote food processing industry.

She informed that the India got investments worth over Rs 31,000 crore in the “World Food India”, that held in November last year.

Further she added that the government had sanctioned 14 cold chains out of the total 40 applications received for the setting up of the cold chain projects across the states that to be set up in UP.

Talking about her recent visit to Poland, she said that the Poland is quite interested in building stronger agricultural ties with India and even has proposed to become a hub for exporting Indiam mangoes in its part of the World.

B.B. Pattanaik, chairman, Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority (WDRA) in his address talked about the need to promote capacity building in terms of creating requisite infrastructure and skill development.

Viney Khunger, managing director, Carrier Air Conditioning & Refrigeration Limited said that one-third of everything that is produced in India gets wasted as such there is need for setting up an effective and integrated cold chain infrastructure.

Addressing the conference, Pawnexh Kohli, chief advisor and CEO, NCCD (National Centre for Cold-chain Development Department) stressed upon the need to build backend farm gate aggregation points.

He said, though there are enough number of cold stores in India but due to dearth of infrastructure we are unable to transport farmers’ produce directly to markets.