Organisation

Agri-Warehousing – Creating Storage Infrastructure For Agricultural Commodities

The agricultural sector is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Indian economy. It not only feeds the country's population, but is also the source of livelihood for more than half of it. One of the key issues in recent times is food security, which has forced the country to adopt new and improved measures of feeding its expanding population with proper quantity and quality of food. India is blessed with favorable climatic conditions for the production of a wide variety of crops and boasts of having a large share of cultivated land, amounting to nearly 52 percent of its total area. In 2011, India held the record for producing 244,000 kilo tons of food grains. However, the country's agricultural sector alone cannot sustain its food requirement. Going hand in hand with it is the infrastructure segment, which plays a pivotal role in transporting and distributing the pre- and post-harvest requirements of the sector. Although India has the basic ingredients of success in the agricultural sector, wide gaps in its infrastructure segment continue to stump this booming sector.

With logistics and storage being the main problems - the former is being aggressively addressed by the government while storage still remains a significant problem across the country. The government purchases a big portion of grain crops annually for its Public Distribution System. The lack of modern storage infrastructure has left the government with no other option but to store outside with insufficient protection from weather and pests. Due to this, there is a huge loss of grains procured by the government. A study done by an American institution predicts that in 2011 alone, 10 million tons of grain in the storage system faced the risk of rotting and wastage due to lack of proper storage facility.

Due to highly capital intensive nature of business combined with land acquisition obstacles generally faced by the companies, not many companies have ventured into this field. But OSR Infra along with its associate companies plans to construct and operate modern and well-equipped storage and protection services for the entire range of agricultural commodities across the country coupled with other related value-added services.

OSR INFRA is currently building agri-warehouses across various states of the country. By December 2014, we intend to have capacity to store 2,50,000 metric tonnes of grains with a mixture of conventional warehouses, silos, and railway sided godowns. We are continuously working towards procuring more orders from various institutions. Expansion of another 2,00,000 metric tonnes storage capacity is in pipeline.