Indian food industry is highly fragmented with major manufacturing activities concentrated in the hands of small scale players with very little technical strength. The result is that consumer is faced with the daunting task of identifying good products from the indifferent and low quality products. The branded food segment has high visibility though their share in total production is much less and most of them have some form of rudimentary technical infrastructure for meeting their immediate technical needs. But it is the long term requirements that cannot be met by such limited facilities and this is where dedicated R & D institutions come into the picture. The Food Industry Center at University of Minnesota in the US is a model set-up geared to serve the industry through many imaginative collaborative programs.
"The Food Industry Center supports its work as an academic thought leader and researcher on the food industry through general operating support from its Sponsoring Membership program and contributions from individuals. Donors ensure continued success in the education of current and future industry leaders through the Center's Symposium and Networking events and student intern programs. They also support the Center's working paper series and the continued production of primary research on the food industry".
Despite the existence of the 60 year old CFTRI at Mysore and the establishment of the "brand new "NIFTEM in Haryana, the distance between the industry and these institutions remain as wide as it was decades ago with no initiative forth coming from either side to bridge the gap. Added to this there are umpteen number of universities in the country with potential to carry out technical service for the industry but this is only on paper with practically no university having any decent research program for or from the industry. Public funded R & D agencies are cozy with the situation as there is hardly any accountability for millions of rupees from the tax payers being guzzled year after year in the name of research with practically no relevance to the needs of the industry at large. If these institutions are not able to create workable net work with the industry, they can as well be closed for good. GOI must take this matter seriously and "wake" them up to deliver what is expected from them. It is time for creating a mechanism for "twinning" them with the processing industry for better accountability and service.
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