Jan 27, 2020
West Bengal has been able to upgrade up its annual production of onions to 700,000 tons per annum from 400,000 tons, some years back.
According to a senior official, West Bengal has plans to build up a 50,000-ton humidity-controlled cold store facility for onions in Murshidabad district. The cold storage unit is likely to be functional from 2021, he stated. “It will be the first specialized cold storage for onions in the country of such a scale. The facility will have an optimum capacity of 50,000 tons,” West Bengal Agri Advisor to the chief minister, Pradip Mazumdar, said. “This facility will help avert a sudden spike in prices. Unlike potatoes, onions require humidity control at 55 per cent for longer preservation”, he said.
The onion project will be executed by a private sector firm. “The land is ready, technology is from Italy and financial closure will be achieved shortly to facilitate actual construction”, Mazumdar said. So far, only small-sized cold storage facilities are in operation in major onion-producing zones of the country.
The ICAR-Directorate of Onion and Garlic Research had recently said in a study that the traditional method of storing onions causes wastage as high as 46 % and wastage reduced to just 7% when the onion bulbs were kept under the temperature of 27°C and relative humidity level of 60-65 per cent, it said.