The Hindu Business Line : Tracking grain storage on screen

Four huge storage bins adjacent to the Elavur railway station, some 50 km from Chennai – on the Chennai-Kolkata railway route – are now a landmark. Built by Adani Agri Logistics Ltd, they store 25,000 tonnes of wheat for the Food Corporation of India (FCI) for sale to private flour mills and distribution through ration shops.

A visit to the silo springs a surprise. A typical FCI godown involves hundreds of people loading and unloading. At the modern silo hardly anyone is seen. The entire operation — right from the time the grain is discharged from the wagon to loading them onto trucks for dispatch — is driven by information technology. Four or five persons, glued to two personal computer monitors, remote control the entire operations from a small room at the silo. They monitor the temperature inside the bins; run the entire supply chain, including the conveyor system and movement of foodgrain. They can even monitor the quality parameters such as moisture, insect presence, restricting overflow of grain and aeration/fumigation.

Result: The wastage at the silo is less than one per cent. This is only due to “unhygenic dust”, says Mr Munishwar Vasudeva of the Adani Group firm. Wastage at the FCI godowns could be about 20 per cent.

Adani is running a base depot at Moga in Punjab with a storage capacity of two lakh tonnes and maintains field depots at Chennai, Coimbatore and Bangalore and Kolkata with a storage capacity of 25,000 tonnes each besides one near Mumbai with a capacity of 50,000 tonnes.

Asked if the employees do not get bored by starring at the monitors for days together when no continuous loading and unloading takes place, Mr Vasudeva says it is just the beginning. The new system is just falling into place. The minimum work expected under normal condition is to pack about 300 tonnes a day. It will go up to 1,000 tonnes in the near future.

Adopting IT was aimed at creating a safe system for humans and transparency. “It is not aimed at avoiding manpower. There is no unproductive manpower, but only skilled people. In the chain, unskilled manpower throughout the supply chain is at the bagging stage only. This will also get eliminated when the country adapts the bulk handling system at the consumption point. A sophisticated cleaning and storage management prevents contamination with dirt or infestation with pests, funguses and bacteria in view of later processing,” says Mr Vasudeva.

Adani has domain knowledge and created the standard operating procedures. The logistics software working has been prepared by L&T and Adani has applied for a copyright for the system.