Abstract

Thoughts on Make in India Case for Agri-Food Processing Sector: India Specific Innovations for Global Bioproducts

Rajender Sangwan, Chief Executive Officer, Center of Innovative and Applied Bioprocessing

India is rich in many ways. Agriculture is one of them with production supremacy in many agri-produce including milk, fruits, vegetables, guar, castor, herbals, flavors, spices, essential oils etc. However, our value harvest/return for our products is quite low. This gap stems from little or limited scale of processing technology aided products of higher value. In several cases, although global technologies are available even free-from IPR restrictions but products based on them are very limited in scale as well as variety. This suggests a strong case of possibilities for implementation of ‘make in India’. The deep and pragmatic analysis is required for identifying bottlenecks and their relative adverse impact in achieving desired productivity. Besides, case-specific bottlenecks as well as bioresource aggregation and supply chain strengthening, technology scale-adjustments and simplifications, seasonality-independent product manufacturing strategies etc. are important factors desired for assuring an economic sense to the agri-food processing based factors. This calls for India-specific innovations for customized products through either customization of technology modules to Indian realities and/or indigenization of technologies including scales. The benchmark in each case currently is cost-matching to imports with quality at least the same or better than competition. Alternate sweeteners, specialty chemicals, nutraceuticals, nutritional proteins and protein hydrolysates, enzymes, biopolymers, biofilms etc. are some of the products of top-tier. Representative examples of bio-products from unutilized or under-utilized bioresources would be presented at the conference.