Union Government Invites EoI For Setting Up Mega Food Parks

The Union government on Tuesday (Feb 9) floated Expression of Interest (EoI) for submission of proposals for setting up of Mega Food Parks in the country under Mega Food Park Scheme (MFPS). The last date for submission of the proposal would be March 3.

Mega Food Park Scheme, launched by the Ministry of Food Processing Industries, aims to provide modern infrastructure facilities for the food processing along the value chain from the farm to the market. It seeks to create processing infrastructure near the farm, transportation, logistics and centralized processing centres.

Under the Mega Food Park Scheme, a capital grant at the rate of 50 percent of the eligible project cost in general areas and at the rate of 75 percent of eligible project cost in difficult and hilly areas i.e. North East Region including Sikkim, J&K, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and ITDP notified areas of the States subject to a maximum grant of Rs.50 crore per project.

The time schedule for completion and successful operationalisation of a Mega Food Park project is 30 months from the date of final approval to the project.

The scheme, which functions with a cluster based approach, is aimed a5 creation of infrastructure for primary processing and storage near the farm in the form of Primary Processing Centres (PPCs) and Collection Centres (CCs) and common facilities and enabling infrastructure like roads, electricity, water, Effluent Treatment Plant (ETP) facilities etc. at Central Processing Centre (CPC). These PPCs and CCs act as aggregation and storage points to feed raw material to the processing units located in the CPC. The scheme will be demand-driven, and will facilitate food processing units to meet environmental and safety standards.

Currently about 22 mega food parks are operational out of already 37 approved across the country.

The operational mega food parks are located in 15 states including Assam, Punjab, Odisha, Mizoram, Maharashtra.