The Hindu Business Line : ‘Green corridor’ in highways planned; ‘no toll’ charges for farmers

It will link rural roads with National Highways and will be implemented along with the six-lane project under the National Highways Development Programme, according to Mr. T.R. Baalu, Minister of Shipping and Road Transport.

The total road network in the country is around 33 lakh km. Of this, 25 lakh km is rural roads and 68,000 km is National Highways.

While the farming community is providing a helping hand in the country’s GDP (gross domestic product), the connectivity between the rural roads and the highways is missing.

The ‘green corridor’ will be used by farmers to transport their produce to various warehouses and markets, the minister said in his address at a seminar on ‘Warehousing 2008 – The Warehousing (Development and Regulation Act 2007); Issues and Challenges’ organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

“The green corridor will give impetus to the agricultural economy,” he said. The Union Government and State governments will share the cost, he said without disclosing any numbers or a timeframe for the project.

The project is being discussed within the ministry for the last one week and a policy needs to be worked out, and later taken up with the Planning Commission, he said.

Grain output

According to Mr Baalu, the grain production in the country has increased to 231 million tonnes (mt) in 2007-08 compared with 51 mt in 1951.

The Government of India procured 33.5 mt of wheat and rice last year.

While the total inventory is around 266 mt the warehouse capacity is only 54 mt.

Even if there is a 50 per cent addition in the capacity, there will still remain a huge deficit in space, he added.

There is a need to develop number of warehouses and for this the investment should come through the private-public-partnership (PPP) model, he said.

Storage quality

In his inaugural speech the Tamil Nadu Governor, Mr Surjit Singh Barnala, said it is estimated that around 12 per cent of the post-harvest stock stored in public warehouses gets damaged due to lack of quality storage.

Further, a preventable post-harvest loss of food grains is estimated to be around 20 mt a year, which is nearly 10.5 per cent of the total production.

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