By When farmers harvest humungous crops, as they need drained state with maize since the mid-2000s, it generates opportunities on the far side cultivation and sale of manufacture. obscurity is that this a lot of evident than within the business of storage and disposition against grain equipped by farmers, traders, feed millers and starch makers.
Purnea district — home to Gulab Bagh, the country’s biggest wholesale marketplace for maize — alone these days has warehouses that may along store some half-dozen.5 hundred thousand tonnes (lt) of the feedgrain. alternative districts with important calculable maize storage capacities area unit Katihar (2 lt); Begusarai (1.5 lt); Araria, Khagaria, Muzaffarpur and Vaishali (50,000 tonnes each); Saharsa and Samastipur (40,000 tonnes each); Supaul (20,000 tonnes); and Madhepura and Motihari (10,000 tonnes each).
“Bihar’s obtainable capability to store maize is roughly thirteen.2 lt. abundant of it’s come back up since around 2013-14, by which era the state was already a serious corn producer likewise as bourgeois,” notes Unupom Kausik, president of the National Collateral Management Services Ltd (NCML), India’s largest non-public sector agri-logistics company.
Also scan | A state poll singularity, Plurals chief is looking forward to age, agenda, ambition
NCML has 2.16 lt of storage capability in state, each chartered and closely-held. The latter includes a thirty eight,200-tonne progressive silo complicated at Purnea, established in June 2017, with facilities for improvement and cooling loose maize brought by farmers. It conjointly owns dry warehouses – these store grain in jute/polypropylene luggage – of nineteen,800 tonnes capability in Purnea and another of sixteen,200 tonnes at Samastipur.
“Before 2013-14, state had hardly 3-4 lt capability. Even the warehouses that existed were little and scattered. The grain that farmers or traders brought had to, therefore, be straightaway sent by rail from rake points (such as Purnea, Jalalgarh, Ranipatra, Katihar, Semapur, Khagaria, Mansi, Barauni, Saharsa, Forbesganj and Kishanganj). organized storage has created it potential to store grain inside state and stagger sales. state corn conjointly fetches higher costs currently than earlier, once finding rakes throughout the height selling season (April-June) was itself a retardant,” says Kausik.
Bihar produces 60-65 lt of maize annually, nearly 1 / 4 of the country’s total. Most of its crop is adult throughout the rabi winter-spring season and harvested when Apr, once there’s little or no production within the remainder of Asian nation. there’s cash, then, to be made of stocking Bihar’s maize and commerce through April-October, before the arrival of the post-monsoon kharif crop in South Asian nation, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Besides NCML, another necessary and rising storage player in state is Arya Collateral storage Services Ltd (ACWS). In 2019-20, its 220 warehouses across the state equipped three.14 lt, three-fourth of that comprised maize and also the balance wheat, paddy and rice. ACWS, in contrast to NCML, solely leases and doesn’t own any warehouse.
A maize monger along with his luggage at a warehouse close to Khagaria in state. (Express pic by Harish Damodaran)
“We conjointly like operational within the interiors. Since transaction house is cheaper there, we tend to area unit able to supply storage services (inclusive of storage, insurance and application charges) at Rs 8-9 per quintal per month, as against Rs 12-14 in places like Purnea that have already got substantial storage capacities,” says Prasanna Rao, decision maker of ACWS.
Rao’s company grossed regarding Rs a hundred twenty five large integer last business from managing one,300-odd warehouses with twenty one lt mixture capability everywhere Asian nation. A fifth of that revenue came from state. ACWS has, a lot of recently, ventured into agri-lending through an entirely closely-held subsidiary, Aryadhan money Solutions Pvt. Ltd. The latter has cumulatively disbursed Rs 250 large integer price loans, a tenth of them in state.
“Fifty per cent of it’s been to farmers or farmer producer organisations (FPOs) and also the remaining [*fr1] to little traders/produce aggregators. we tend to lend at thirteen.5-14% annual interest strictly against their manufacture unbroken at our warehouses. Our average loan size is Rs five hundred thousand to farmers, Rs twenty two hundred thousand to FPOs and Rs twenty eight hundred thousand to aggregators, compared to the Rs one.5-2 large integer that banks ordinarily extend against warehouse receipts,” states Rao.
The future of storage, per him, lies in making storage-cum-financing solutions “closer to the farm gate”. this is able to mean having smaller warehouses than even the common one,400-1,500 tonnes capability operated by ACWS.
One answer, that ACWS claims to possess with success tried out with FPOs in Begusarai and Samastipur, is versatile tight storage technology. This involves storing luggage within versatile airtight and moisture-proof structures or “cocoons” made of special plastic material. every such hermetically sealed cocoon will stock anyplace between one hundred and half-dozen,000 luggage (5-300 tonnes) of grain that need no application or chemical treatment.
“So rather than building a warehouse, we tend to may merely set these up in Associate in Nursing empty field for farmers in any cluster to stock their manufacture and avail finance,” adds Rao.
