A 50,000-tonne onion storage facility coming up in Murshidabad district to be operational from 2021 can help prevent wastage of onions and keep prices under control in the state.
The onion storage facility of such a scale will be the first of its kind in India, a senior officer of the state agriculture department said. So far, even the major onion producing states in the country don’t have such large scale storage facility. Onions in these states are stored in small-sized storages.
The humidity in the storage will be kept under control to prevent rotting or drying up. Maintaining a proper percentage of humidity in onion storages is crucial. Storing onions at the optimum humidity level is important as it reduces post-harvest losses. Under optimum conditions of humidity in the cold storages, the loss after six months of storage is reduced to only five per cent which is mainly due to moisture loss.
Recently, the country saw steep rise in onion prices which was mainly due to loss of crops owing to flooding. The price of onion is still high due to acute shortage of the crop which could have been averted to a certain extent within the state, if such specialised storage facilities had been there.
Currently, the state produces around seven lakh tonne of onion. However, that is not enough to meet the annual consumption which stands at 8.5 lakh tonne. Thus the state has to bring in onion from other states. But this amount can be reduced if Bengal is able to cut down losses that result from lack of storage facilities.
The proposed storage facility will be built by a private company with technology imported from Italy, the official said.
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