PAU Trains 25 Rural Entrepreneurs in Agro-Processing Under SCSP

Twenty-five scheduled caste beneficiaries from three Punjab villages completed a training camp on entrepreneurship in agro-processing at Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana. The Department of Processing and Food Engineering ran the programme with the Skill Development Centre, funded under the Scheduled Caste Sub Plan (SCSP) of the All India Coordinated Research Project on Post-Harvest Engineering and Technology (AICRP-PHET).

The trainees came from Talwara, Baranhara and Jassian. That's a deliberately tight catchment: village-level participants who can take equipment know-how and pest-control practice straight back to farm-level operations.

What did the training actually cover?

Dr MS Alam, Principal Scientist and scheme in-charge of AICRP-PHET at PAU, opened with the orientation and laid out the objectives and learning outcomes. He framed agro-processing complexes as the backbone of the programme's case: they maintain the quality of agricultural produce, cut post-harvest losses through proper handling and processing, extend product shelf life and create employment opportunities for rural youth.

Alam also stressed the commercial logic behind the science. Scientific processing, grading, packaging and value addition of durable agricultural products, spices and honey, he said, could help farmers earn better returns, improve the market value of their produce and support the development of farmers and rural entrepreneurs.

The technical sessions then moved through five practical modules:

• Grain storage and pest control. Dr Manpreet Kaur Saini, Senior Entomologist, ran a session on household-level grain storage and demonstrated the PAU protection kit for stored pulses. She explained integrated pest management (IPM) methods for controlling pests in stored food grains, and showed participants live insects and damaged grain samples so they could identify storage pests and learn how to control them.
• Farm-level processing machinery. Dr Rohit, Senior Scientist, introduced the machines used for processing food grains, oilseeds and pulses, and explained how the right equipment supports value addition and improves profitability at the farm level.
• Jaggery processing. Dr Surekha Bhatia covered farm-level jaggery production with practical guidance on quality evaluation and testing. She emphasised improving product quality, consistency and market acceptability to strengthen jaggery's prospects as a value-added product.
• Mushroom enterprises. Dr Gagandeep Kaur Nagra presented mushroom production and processing as a remunerative enterprise, covering scientific cultivation practices, post-harvest handling and available processing options — and the income and entrepreneurial potential of mushroom-based businesses.
• Fruit and vegetable dehydration. Dr Preeti explained the role of dehydration machinery in processing agricultural produce and the opportunities the technology offers for building a remunerative business.

Participants didn't leave empty-handed. PAU distributed its literature, PAU protection kits for stored pulses and seasonal fruit and vegetable processing kits free of cost — meaning the storage and processing practices demonstrated on campus can be replicated immediately at home.

What does this change for rural entrepreneurs?

For practitioners, the programme bundles the three things small processors most often lack: technical knowledge across five product categories, hands-on pest identification with real damaged-grain samples, and starter hardware. The SCSP funding removes the cost barrier for the targeted beneficiaries, and every module tied a technology to a revenue line — jaggery quality for market acceptability, dehydration machinery for a processing business, mushrooms for income diversification.

Dr TC Mittal, Head of the Department of Processing and Food Engineering, appreciated the trainees' active participation and commended the AICRP-PHET team's dedicated efforts in organising the SCSP programme.

The camp signals where PAU sees the next tier of rural enterprise forming: not in commodity farming itself, but in the processing, storage and value-addition layer above it. If even a handful of the 25 trainees turn the kits and know-how into jaggery, mushroom or dehydration ventures, the SCSP model becomes a template other agricultural universities can copy.