New Delhi, February 9
The Cabinet today cleared the notification of National Centre for Cold Chain Development (NCCD), tasked with establishing infrastructure and logistics to preserve fruit, vegetables and other perishable items as a registered society. The society will be a public-private initiative involving two leading industry chambers as well.

India is the second largest producer of horticulture commodities such as fruits, vegetables and flowers in the world. But a significant part of that goes waste due to lack of cold chain facilities.

Some 71.5 million tonnes of fruit, 133.7 million tonnes of vegetables and 17.8 million tonnes of other perishable commodities like flowers, spices, coconut, cashew, mushroom and honey are produced annually.

The NCCD will be mandated with prescribing technical standards for cold chain infrastructure and undertaking their periodic revision, besides human resource development programmes for meeting the needs of skilled manpower of the cold chain sector.

In another decision, the government today gave its clearance to the policy on sharing data and information among various departments which would help in effective framing of national policies and planning.

The clearance to the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy came at the meeting of the Union Cabinet chaired here by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It will make it mandatory for every department to share data.

"The data and information will be shared in both human readable and machine readable forms through a network all over the country in a proactive and periodically updatable manner," a government statement said.

This would help one ministry work out its policies in a better manner where adequate data from the other ministries would also be kept in mind while framing such policies.

The sharing will be in consonance with the policies, acts and rules of the government, therefore, permitting a wider accessibility and use of public data and information, the statement added.