Imagine thousands of mangoes lying on the ground after a heavy storm; the farmer has no option other than a distress sale.
Post-harvest losses are huge in India — nearly ₹61,000 crore, according to one estimate.
There are several reasons for the loss at the farm level. The answer to this is, of course, cold storage.
But cold storage facilities still have few takers in India, so they fail to generate a decent return for the owners.
Energy Efficiency Services Ltd, the public sector for-profit company meant to usher in energy-efficient products, has come up with the idea of solar-powered micro cold storage units that can be transported on trucks to wherever they are needed.
Night-time cooling can be provided by ‘phase changing chemicals’ — these are cooled using solar energy during daytime and, in turn, cool the chamber at night-time.
Compact units
While typical cold storage units in India have capacities of several tens of tonnes, EESL is talking of 3–5 tonnes, and storage for limited days.
EESL is all set to inaugurate the first three of the proposed six pilot ‘micro cold storage units’, each of which can briefly store 5 tonnes of horticultural produce. EESL aims to have over 3,000 such units across the country, in a bid to slash post-harvest agri losses.
Two of the three units ready for commissioning are in Andhra Pradesh and the third is in Himachal Pradesh.
Anil Kumar Choudhary, Chief General Manager and Head-Operations, EESL, told businessline that ‘cooling as a service’ is the underlying business model.
The agreement is typically with a farmer producer organisation — the FPO pays a ‘per kg per day’ fee to EESL, he explained at a recent workshop on renewable energy that was organised for journalists in Kanpur by the Earth Journalism Network.
Price discovery
The EESL pilot has been funded by a $120 million grant from ADB.
Vishal Kapoor, CEO, EESL, said the company is keen to discover pricing and that the micro cold storage units should be commercially viable — the pilot units are subsidised by the ADB grant.