By Vimal Kedia, Managing Director, Manjushree Technopack

The raw material prices have globally increased by 40% and more and this is in addition to credit squeeze in the market faced by most SMEs. Credit availability at reasonable rates, particularly for the SME segment is something that the Government needs to address as part of the Budget or otherwise.
 
In our opinion, packaging, especially for food and beverages, need to be treated at par with the food processing industry. The fortunes of the two are closely interlinked and manufacturing standards in a sense needs to be common for both.

Incentives should be given to create a solid cold chain infrastructure for supporting industries like dairy. This will help in minimizing losses arising from transit, storage, etc and promote dairy processing in a big way. 

The government should take steps to rationalize imports of machinery. With competition in most industries being global, it is important that Indian companies invest in R&D and Technology. However, the cost of importing is a big deterrent to forward looking companies. This will result in mediocre quality and economies of scale will be hard to achieve.

In order to promote greener packaging, Government should consider subsidizing the production of bio-degradable plastics which has gained lot of popularity in the western countries. This will also help to reduce considerable amount of landfills which is a growing concern in urban India today.

A lot of regional players have expressed interest to get into food processing.  However, the cost ‘setting up’ along with raw material and machinery cost is considered an expensive exercise. Budget could provide for a systematic way of providing incentives to these smaller players to encourage and promote food processing; this will both help agriculture and promote use of good packaging material.

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