As bananas flourish in Punjab, a more scientific way to store and ripen them is also being developed. This is urgently required, as the state gets the fruit from the southern and western states as raw, and ripens it with banned products such as calcium carbide.

While private agencies developing farm-to-fork post-harvest facilities with a few already having set up their packaging houses for scientific storage of perishables for their retail operations in the state, as many as 10 markets of the state will also be modernised under various schemes of the Punjab State Marketing Board.

To start with, the first such fruit and veggie market will come up in Ludhiana with the technical assistance of Voltas group of Tatas. “The modern markets will have ripening chambers where fruits such as mangoes, bananas and papayas will be ripened through ethylene gas and not banned products, as is the practice at present. These markets will also offer the facility of storage of fruits,” says Dr B S Ghuman of PAU ‘s Post Harvest Technology Centre, which has done the feasibility study for the modern market coming up in Ludhiana.