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Transporting pineapples, cause for concern.

The Meghalaya Government has sought the assistance of the Container Corporation of India (Concor) to tackle the storage and transportation problems of the perishables produced in the State. Meghalaya produces large quantities of fruits and flowers such as pineapples (as much as 80,000 tonnes), strawberries, colour capsicums, roses and various such products annually , but a sizeable portion of it gets wasted due to the lack of transportation and storage facilities. The Gove rnment’s immediate concern is how to reopen its closed cold storage and how to transport in the fastest possible way about 25,000 tonnes of pineapples annually to a processing plant at Siliguri in the northern part of West Bengal.

True, Concor has the expertise mainly in transportation of containers by rail but its wholly-owned subsidiary, Fresh & Healthy Enterprise, has also been running a state-of-the-art cold storage, mainly for fruits, at Rai, near Sonepat (Haryana), for the past one-and-a-half years.

The Meghalaya Government is therefore mulling over the possibility of handling over the storage to Concor. At present, pineapples are moved to Siliguri in open trucks, but the experience has not been happy. What the State perhaps wants is transportation of pineapples all the way either by refrigerated trucks or a combination of refrigerated trucks (from Meghalaya to Guwahati) and reefer rail containers (Guwahati to Siluguri). Whether it will be a viable proposition is of course another matter.

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More Stories on : Supply Chain Management | Horticulture/Fruits & Vegetables

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