Vegetables play a major role in our diet towards providing nutritional and food security as vegetables are rich sources of vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre and phytochemicals. Increased vegetable consumption in our diet reduces many modern life style diseases such as coronary heart diseases, hypertension, type-2 diabetes, renal diseases etc. Vegetable production is seasonal in nature and in certain period of life cycle, the vegetable production exceeds the demand. As a result, the producer is unable to get the remunerative price of its produce and vegetable growers are forced to sale their produce at very low price in view of poor post-harvest management practices and lack of suitable low cost processing facilities available in our country. Presently the value addition in our country is only 2.2% and large quantities of vegetables around 4.58-12.44% perish and accounting the losses of around of Rs. 15000 crore per annum. Furthermore, vegetable growers face many problems such as lack of cold chain management practices in our country, lack of mechanized sorting/grading facilities, non-availability of genotypes suitable for processing, optimum harvesting time of vegetables and lack of complete value chain in vegetable market. Many public and private sectors in our country is focusing low cost drying technology, hurdle technology, minimal processing, steeping preservation, and technologies towards ready-to-eat and easy-to-cook vegetables to increase the processing facilities for increasing the farmer’s income. The present Central and State
Government in our country is further promoting processing facilities of perishable crops especially vegetables by providing loans at nominal interest, giving subsidiaries to boost the processing facilities in vegetables for reducing the post-harvest losses and increasing the value addition in vegetables.