It is an irony that our country known to be the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world finds that agricultural products like fruit and vegetables worth enormous sum of Rs. 13,300 crore go waste every year. The irony is that while the prices of vegetables are soaring so high such a large quantity is lost for want of cold storage. It is incredible. India is tropical country with warm climate round the year. Fruits and vegetables are perishable commodities and cannot survive long. The only way to preserve these items is to have large cold storages in every town and city and even villages. This is an enormous project. But the country cannot afford such a vast loss of her agricultural products when her people are in great need of these products.
We would, therefore, suggest that the State Government focuses on this issue and thinks of a plan of having mega cold stores for preservation of these two particular commodities. There are some cold stores in Azadpur Mandi in Delhi where the fruit from Kashmir is preserved. But there is need of having such stores in Srinagar and Jammu also. In particular cold stores for vegetables would help in maintaining the level of reasonable price of these commodities. According to an investment of more than Rs 55,000 crore is needed by 2015-2016 just to keep up with growing fruit and vegetable production levels.
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