Cold storage facilities in Punjab

To utilise the potential of agriculture exports of the state, Markfed, in collaboration with the Agricultural and Processed Food Export Development Agency (APEDA), will establish a multi-utility pack house-cum-cold storage at the Dhandari Kalan village near Ludhiana.

"Since Punjab has the maximum potential of agriculture exports and to explore it we have decided to establish multi-utility pack house-cum-cold storage at Dhandari Kalan village, for which the construction work has already been initiated" Dr H B S Sandhu, Chief Manager of Markfed told reporters here today.

Giving detail about the project, Sandhu revealed that the project, with an estimated cost of Rs seven crore would be completed by March next year and would have capacity to store 2500 tone of crop for its grading, packing and storage. Although the basic crop for the project would be potato, initially other crops would be taken up, he said.

He revealed in the state there was more than 70,000 hectares of land, which was being used for potato cultivation and this year total production of potato was about 14 lakh tones.

He claimed currently the Punjab was supplying more than five per cent of total requirement of upper quality of potato seed to the country.

Asked why Marked chose particular village of Dhandhari Kalan for such a prestigious project, Sandhu revealed that since the village was situated nearby of Dry Port of Ludhiana, it would be easy to transport the crop for export.

On a query about the proposed export of potato to Pakistan after the latter's allowing duty free import of the crop, Sandhu said that Markfed has approached the Pakistani authorities on the issue and they informed that currently they were interested to import potato only but not the potato seed.

Since, currently Pakistani was importing Potato seed from Holland, it would take at least two or three years to import the Indian seed but Pakistan has already requested us for sending Potato, for which the first lot would be dispatched very soon.