India will get its first rice silos which will come up at Buxar and Kaimur in Bihar and these are likely to be operational by next month. With the completion of these silos, the country now has rice silos for the first time to prevent cereals wastage during storage, as it already has silos for storing wheat.

These two rice silos are part of the government’s pilot project to set up steel silos and are executed under the design-build-finance-operate-transfer (DBFOT) model.

The combined capacity of 25,000 tonne is being built by the National Commodity Management Services (NCML) under the private-public partnership (PPP) model with the Food Corporation of India (FCI). In addition, FCI will store food grains for 30 years, while the silos will be operated by a private entity. It will pay a storage charge of about Rs 100 tonne monthly.

Presently, 1.3 million tonne (MT) of wheat silos have been developed by private entities, including Adani Agri Logistics, KCC Infrastructure and NCML for FCI, and 1.1 MT of wheat silos are under construction. Moreover, FCI and state agencies have grain storage capacities of 33.7 MT and 37.6 MT, respectively.