Lessons from Operation Flood for Operation Green
Finance Minister of India recently announced that Operation Green (OG) will be expanded beyond tomatoes, onions, and potatoes (TOP) to 22 perishable commodities.
What is Operation Green?
Operation Greens is a project approved by the Ministry of Food Processing Industries with the target to stabilise the supply of tomato, onion and potato crops (TOP crops) in India, as well as to ensure their availability around the country, year-round without price volatility.
Background of Operation Green
Operation Green was originally launched in 2018 by the late Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. It has been now three years, and it may be useful to see how it has progressed so far, and whether it has achieved its objectives. Based on this rapid appraisal, one can suggest what else needs to be fixed to ensure that it delivers quickly and effectively as it expands to cover 22 commodities.
Objectives of Operation Green
The basic objectives of the Operation Green project are
- It should control the wide price instability in the three largest vegetables of India (Tomatoes, Onions, and Potatoes).
- It should build efficient value chains so that a larger share of the consumers’ money is received by the farmers.
- It should reduce the post-harvest losses by building modern warehouses and cold storage.
Problems with Operation Green project
- Operation Greens is going slow. Price volatility remains high and farmers’ share in consumers’ rupee is still low.
- There is no separate board for Operation Greens such as National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) which played an important role in Operation Flood.
- The criteria for choosing clusters for TOP crops under OG is not very transparent and clear.
- While some important districts have been left out from the list of clusters, less important ones have been included.
- The subsidy scheme will have to be made innovative with new generation entrepreneurs, startups and FPOs. There is a lack of enough FPOs to push the scheme.
