Food processing sector will witness spectacular growth in the coming years with the steady inflow of investments. Huge prospects are emerging in the ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook segments in India. Availability of skilled manpower has been identified as one of the major challenges which creates lot of opportunities for unemployed youth to work as skilled manpower in the food processing sector.
Ministry of Food Processing Industries (MoFPI) is working in close collaboration with Food Industry Capacity and Skill Initiative (FICSI), the Sector Skill Council (SSC) in food processing and regularly guiding and assisting it in achieving its mandate. The FICSI is working on identification of job roles and competencies required for each job role so as to develop National Occupational Standards (NOS) for different sectors of food processing. The scope of this work is to determine what skills are required in different parts of our country with respect to food processing activity being undertaken there. It shall include generic and domain specific skills in the major sectors of food processing domain like Fruits and Vegetables, Food Grain Milling, Dairy Products, Meat and Poultry, Fish& Sea Food, Bread and Bakery, Beverages, Soya Food Processing and Packaged Foods.
There has been an increase of 40 percent of Foreign Direct Investment in the food processing sector during 2016-17. Of the total agriculture products, only 10 percent is processed in India leading to wastage of agriculture products and middlemen cheating and farmer’s distress. At a time, agriculture is moving towards agribusiness sustainability of the sector depends on diversification towards food processing sector.
It has been forecasted that India’s retail sector will show a growth of 1.3 trillion US dollar growth from 600 billion US dollar over the next three years; of which 70 percent will be from food market. As many as 42 mega food parks and hundreds of mini food parks will emerge in the country during this period. Ministry of Food processing is planning to create five lakh employment opportunities by 2022 with the investment under Sampada Yojana programme which will go a long way in developing the food processing industry and creating employment opportunities for the youth. Moreover, scarcity of food technologists, scientists and researchers with Entrepreneurship back ground exist in the country.
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