Centre picks innovators to manage tomatoes, analysts say no point reinventing the wheel

Tomato prices recently scaled a five-year peak, drilling holes in consumers’ pockets across India, the world’s second-largest producer of the vegetable.

Prices of tomatoes and onions, two basic ingredients of most Indian dishes, tend to rise and fall every alternate year or so due to weather disruptions, inadequate cold storage facilities and low levels of processing into durable items such as ketchups and pastes, official data show. Post-harvest wastages are high, leading to losses.

The central government last year threw open a challenge to young tech-savvy innovators to come up with patentable ideas to organise the tomato supply chain, which the consumer affairs ministry proposed to fund.

Nearly 1,376 ideas were received from innovators, and after rigorous rounds of evaluation, 28 proposals have been selected for funding for prototype development, consumer affairs secretary Nidhi Khare said on Friday.

“It’s a good idea to engage with young innovators. Better information about production clusters, mandi arrival schedules and consumption patterns of fresh and processed tomatoes can improve the supply chain, reduce losses and enable better planning of cultivation and marketing,” former Union agriculture secretary Siraj Hussain said.

Some analysts say the government had better focussed on effective implementation of policies already in place. Though India is a leading agricultural producer, large quantities of food are lost or wasted between farm and plate.

“Technology will follow if firms, which have them, invest. We needn’t reinvent the wheel,” said Vinayak Bhan of Greenfield Farms, a horticultural startup.

Shortage infrastructure to process surplus tomatoes is a key hurdle in producing sufficient value-added products, such as purées.

Lack of cold storage facilities and improper handling result in huge losses, which are well-known issues. Tomato incurs the second highest post-harvest losses (11.61%), after guava (15%), according to a 2022 study by the Nabard Consultancy Pvt Ltd (NABCONS).

Fruits and vegetables contribute 37% ( ₹57,004 crores annually) to total economic losses as per the NABCONS report.

Growers also have limited awareness and use of modern agricultural technologies like precision farming and IoT-based monitoring, the consumer affairs ministry said.

The food-processing ministry launched the ambitious Pradhan Mantri Kisan SAMPADA Yojana in 2017 to create modern infrastructure and supply-chain management.

The government also launched a production-linked incentive scheme for the food-processing sector, apart from the Prime Minister’s Formalisation of Micro Food Processing Enterprises. These schemes are precisely aimed at better infrastructure, modern supply chain and to provide incentives for a high level of processing, Bhan said.

Vegetable prices have hurt consumers the most over the past year. Consumer prices rose sharply last month to a higher than expected 6.21%. Vegetable prices surged to nearly a five-year high of 42% on the back of persistently high prices of onions and tomatoes.