FACE2FACE

m a n k i n d ’ s
“Far m , h u d
l a r p ow e r e
first s o
f a ct o r y ”
In Conversation with Capt. Pawanexh Kohli, who stepped down from
the post of Chief Advisor and CEO of National Centre for Cold-chain
Development (NCCD) after an illustrious eight long years. Excerpts:

Q: First things first, there is a lot of and Raghvendra Singh. Each made the was crucial and formative.
buzz including a newspaper article participation of an outsider like myself as More lately, I got to work closely with
that you left NCCD because you their own, aiming for betterment. They Ashok Dalwai on the doubling farmers
could not work with the government? did not have to, but did so, clear-headed income project, yet another invigorat-
Buzzing sounds will sometimes in perception and in their desire to have ing experience with an inspiring mind.
confuse the truth. The term govern- real domain expertise by their side. There are many such dedicated officers
ment generally means the elected lead- Alongside those days was also Sanjeev in the system. A few others I worked with
ership, and the service officers who Chopra, now mentoring the next genera- recently are Vasudha Mishra and Rajesh
include technocrats & bureaucrats. I do tion of officers, continually bolstering our Verma in Agriculture and N. Sivasailam
not remember, even once, if the polit- works, clearing any doubts and helping in Commerce Ministry - admirable indi-
ical leadership intruded in our work. us connect with more minds. Deep viduals indeed, each a purposeful facil-
In fact, they appreciate sincere inputs mutual trust was generated in the initial itator. I am sure there are several more,
from domain experts. I can remember, years, when uncertainties abound most. equally go-to types, objective in their
when Mr. Shekhawat (now Minister, NCCD was a start-up, an experiment, purpose. The same goes for the tech-
Water Resources) pulled me forth from and this support by the establishment nocrats in the system. In fact, I maintain
the backdrop, to applaud the individ-
ual contributions in developing strat-
egies for farm income. Similar good-
will was expressed by Mrs. Badal, Mr.
Radha Mohan Singh, and many others.
I actually admire the gutsy and risk
taking mind-set of our elected leaders,
reflecting the nature of our democracy,
which wants a streamlined system to
support our progress on the road ahead.
Challenges are taken head-on, knowing
that the risk remains in how the imple-
mentation is managed.
The government that comprises of
civil servants was also most support-
ive. I had the chance to evidence some
who believed in wholehearted collabora-
tion with domain professionals. To name
a few - Ashish Bahuguna, Anup Thakur,
Satish Agnihotri, Siraj Hussain, Raghav
Chandra, S.K. Pattanayak, D.K. Jain,

6 DRIVERS DUNIYA ▪ India's First Driver Focused Magazine

that a hefty majority of our govern-
ment officers put in phenomenal effort,
working silently behind the scenes and
trying to put their best foot forward.
I originally came into NCCD for a
short period, only to help incubate a
roadmap. It was never expected I would
continue to lead it for a record 8 years.
Of these, the last 7 years were most pro-
ductive. NCCD could help pioneer and
reshape various interventions, under-
take innovative works to initiate new
paths, all without any adverse hearsay.
The prestige of NCCD was born out of
its dependability and scrupulous credi-
bility that backed its varied contributions,
and our government always held NCCD
in good esteem.
Nonetheless, the government is
huge, and within can also exist other
dispositions. They were not necessarily
personal in aspect, but such personali-
ties can entitle a setting where decisions
were set aside for months and months.
Truth be told, indecision and inertia are
not traits that are normal in this govern-
ment, but ironically, our system can allow
them to surface unwanted. This can
stunt continued professional purpose,
and my individual course was not to
pursue another term and to demit at the
close of this tenure, in Jan-2020.
Q: About cold-chain now, what were
the key improvements made in India's
cold chain logistics industry in the
last 2-3 years, in terms of infrastruc-
ture, transportation, technology,
investments etc.? How fast is the cold
chain industry growing?
India added about one million tons of
capacity each year, over the last 3 years.
In 2016 the total capacity was 34.06 mill
tons and by start of 2019 this added up
to 36.77 mill tons. New figures should
be out in March 2020. New capacity
is spread across various components,
such as reefer transport, pack-houses,
ripening units and, of course, mostly in
cold storages. However, in my opinion,
there remains the need to drive a far
larger shift for the first two, which are
the critical weak links today.
We must remember, like all logistics,
cold-chain works between an OD pair.
The point of origin (O) is where focus
was missing. These points of origin are
like the factory load gates - in case of
cold-chain, it means pack-houses. The
farm is humankind’s first solar powered
factory, and the first-mile pack-house is
its organised loading point. The modern
cold storage is a distribution platform,
mid-point in the logistics chain, to con-
solidate, cross dock or buffer the supply.
The processor, retail and kitchen shelf
is the destination (D). Barring a few
produce types, like potatoes, nuts,
apples, the bulk of fruits and vegetables
cannot be held in situ for long, and per-
ishable inventory must be kept dynamic.
Even in case of frozen ice cream
or meat products, the right idea is to
manufacture or harvest per demand,
and quickly move to market. This
model requires operators to adopt a
mind-set change, to deliver goods for
quicker exchange, rather than to hoard
value in storage. As a strategy, cold-
chain should be developed and used
to connect with where the price is right,
today, rather than to wait for demand to
pick up. The latter, should be done only
after all options to evacuate to market
are exhausted. This shift in business
priorities is slowly coming about, as
more are seeing sense in faster cash
flows, lower inventory costs, and using
cold-chain to expand their marketing
radius. Done properly, it has a cascade
effect on the agrarian economy, espe-
cially for small-holding farmers.
On the technology side, like every-
where else, there is increasing use of
systems to improve traceability of the
product and track-ability of the move-
ment. Use of block-chain, remote mon-
itoring, automation, etc. is picking up.
Robotic systems to put away and pick at
cold warehouses is increasingly coming
into play. A lot of off-grid powered utilities
in cold storages are also seen. These
deploy solar thermal or biomass heat
source for vapour absorption cooling,
solar PV and hybrids for vapour com-
pression cooling, etc. Hopefully, we
should see an increase in developers
taking advantage of geo-thermal cooling
options to ease energy loads. On the
transportation side, a lot of innovation is
tried, including around designs that allow
the same vehicle to carry varied temper-
ature loads, especially for last mile distri-
bution. Transport systems hold the key
to growth. There is now growing focus on
multi-modal domestic cold-chain, given
the large sub-continental distances that
India’s cold-chain must negotiate.
The government adopted sugges-
tions to ease FDI (foreign direct invest-
ment) in cold-chain, and over the last
few years, more than half a billion
dollars were committed. In India, FDI
in cold-chain is permitted up to 100 per
DRIVERS DUNIYA ▪ India's First Driver Focused Magazine
cent and through the automatic route.
The world’s largest operator, Total
Produce is now invested in India, as
well as companies from the Arabia.
To the last part of your question,
cold-chain is not an industry! The cold-
chain essentially belongs to the logis-
tics sector. The industry tag relates more
to the industrial equipment manufactur-
ers or the agro-processors (food and
non-food). Cold-chain itself involves
an interplay with multiple industries; it
is a functional domain and cold-chain
owners must have a cross-disciplinary
approach. It spreads across economic
sectors, and cuts across technologies.
On the whole, cold-chain is a logistics
service and the sector is growing since
the market opportunity is also growing
leaps and bounds.
Robotic systems to
put away and pick
at cold warehouses
is increasingly
coming into play.
The very fact that there are very few
places in India’s 3.3 million square kilo-
metres which are not reached by cold-
chain is an indicator of this story. The
story is embodied by the fact that India
has the world’s largest vaccination
program, is among the top exporters
of beef (albeit carabeef) and fish prod-
ucts, has a humongous dairy and ice-
cream network, and suffers the least
loss in its milk distribution chain… all
enabled by cold-chain. However, like-
wise development for fruits and vege-
tables was ignored. Frozen goods are
easy to handle, it is the living breath-
ing perishable fruits & vegetables chain
where renewed efforts are needed and
where the growth story remains.
Q: What improvements and invest-
ments still need to be made to reduce
spoilage? Is the spoilage rate still as
high as 30% for fruits and veggies?
Spoilage is more apt a term for
when discarded food decomposes.
Discards can happen due to misman-
agement in the logistics chain and is
then called “loss”, or due to the waste-
ful habits of consumers and is called
7
 FACE2FACE
"waste”. “Food loss” can be coun-
tered through good practices in logis-
tics. Food loss is the fault of the deliv-
ery chain and mitigation is the respon-
sibility of supply chain managers. They
require the necessary infrastructure as
basic tools, good understanding of sys-
temic limitations, good SOPs and mon-
itoring of processes followed, and all of
this is driven by an operator’s desire for
growth. The government eases the pro-
vision of the tools, can provide capac-
ity building and trainings, and open
opportunities for cross-regional trade.
On the other hand, countering “food
waste”, primarily requires a behavioural
change in consumers, to avoid ineffi-
cient food habits, become more careful
with their purchase, etc. To explain, a
good analogy is that of electricity dis-
Food loss is the
fault of the delivery
chain and
mitigation is the
responsibility
of supply chain
managers.
tribution. The transmission loss is an
aspect of its logistics technology, and
the misuse of electricity by consumers
is the waste.
As humans, we cherish our individu-
ality and always wish to stand apart from
others. However, we never extend the
same courtesy to our food. There is this
blindly motivated agenda to convince
buyers that all tomatoes must look the
same, or that all bananas should taste
the same and be of same length & girth.
This kind of thinking is driven by mar-
keting spiel, and if we start enjoying the
uniqueness of each, as nature intended,
a lot of food waste can end. This choice
dictates what is discarded as unsaleable
even at the point of production and a lot
of the produce never even enters the
logistics chain.
Simply put, food loss is due to poor
delivery systems, food waste is due to
poor consumer habits. Globally, food
loss is much higher than food waste,
in each region. Stopping food loss
should be the utmost priority and this
means delivering food more efficiently.
However, both loss and waste result in
spoilage and that has a poor impact on
8 DRIVERS DUNIYA ▪ India's First Driver Focused Magazine
the environment since spoilage trans-
lates into greenhouse gases.
Meanwhile, the biggest challenge
is to have people take a break outside
their comfort zones. For too long, people
have thought of the cold as synony-
mous to preservation. Mere preserva-
tion tactics in cold-chain does not stop
losses. Only gainful consumption can
stop food loss. To achieve consumption,
you require to connect with consumers.
Cooling is not an end, but only defers the
inevitable expiry of food, before which
you must opt to supply to demand.
Therefore, cold-chain must not be per-
ceived as a preservation option, but as
a method that buys you time, so as to
run longer distances and connect with
unsated demand. Food loss remains
high, and in some seasons, can even
be higher than 35 per cent.
The first step to stop food loss, is to
capture its occurrence at first mile, near
farms where the discards can be reused.
For this there is need to organise the
supply chain, at first instance, at village
level. The Government has a program
to develop nearly 22,000 GrAMs which
will serve this purpose. The term GrAM,
is an acronym for village level aggre-
gation and dispatch facilities. These will
essentially have pack-houses or pooling
points, where small farm lots will be
aggregated, precooled and dispatched
over road or rail to destinations. The
process of pre-conditioning the produce
(preparing for market), also sorts out the
non-saleable pieces to utilise, such as
for bio-dyes, energy, fodder or compost.
Edible rejects can also be diverted to
support local cottage scale food pro-
cessing to make jams, pickles, so forth.
So, discards need not be wasted spoil,
but can be used, turning would-be-waste
into wealth.
All output of agriculture is biological
in nature. There is no need to have any
spoilage. We need to make sure there
is no loss when communicating goods
to markets, and also ask consumers to
waste nothing.
Q: What other trends or develop-
ments are impacting the cold chain
logistics market in India? Are there
any new regulations or policies
that are impacting the industry for
example?
India is the world’s largest con-
sumer of perishables, predominated by
a largely vegetarian population. There
is a growing preference for fresh fruits
and vegetables, contrary to earlier pro-
jections that with greater affluence the
population will shift towards processed
products. Processed foods are now
mostly relegated to convenience foods,
as growing health awareness is bring-
ing people back to whole fresh foods. In
fact, the more affluent a household, the
more likely they go for fresh foods. This
is going to help grow the cold-chain as
the fresh whole food segment has scope
to grow multi-fold.
Indicated earlier, the cold-chain for
pharmaceuticals is well established,
and this has been driven through regu-
lations as well as pharmaceutical indus-
try wanting to protect their brands. The
frozen or processed food segment is
also regulated to an extent, but that
was also driven by compliance with
what the market demanded and mostly
focused on exports. The fresh segment
will be driven first by the rapidly growing
domestic demand, which in turn will feed
higher productivity, and then by using the
cold-chain to expand marketing range,
even beyond domestic borders.
Barring for strict regulations for safety
of people and environment, other reg-
ulations must aim to ease how we do
business. India has taken tack towards
having a unified one-nation one-market.
Multi-modal movement will be key. We
must understand that while agriculture
will be naturally bound to the location of
individual farms, the market should have
no boundaries. As a federation of states,
we had too many rules that hampered
inter-state trade. These are now being
actively eased at various levels.
Besides a direction towards a one-
India market, the government also pro-
vides strategic support to those wishing
to invest in cold-chain. Besides the incen-
tives in the form of capital subsidy, there
also exists a capital linked tax deduction.
Hence if you invest a hundred in capital,
you can deduct that from your profits
over the next 5 years. As mentioned,
100 per cent FDI is also allowed through
automatic route. All services like precon-
ditioning (ie. sorting, grading, packaging,
precooling), loading, unloading, trans-
port and warehousing of fresh produce
are now exempt from goods & service
tax (GST). There is more being done to
aid and abet the growth of cold-chain.
However, there still remains some
lethargy against change, slowing the
full scope of growth possible. It exists in
promoters, the economists and policy
makers who all give development a
direction. They are yet to think beyond
cold stores and to translate the oppor-
tunity that is cold-chain. This can be
broken by more domain experts getting
involved to guide the planners. That
means more logistics professionals
must become pro-active in sharing their
knowledge & experience, bringing sense
to ambiguity and shattering a few myths
along the way. They must take a bigger
part in nation building efforts.
It should be clear, that without cold-
chain, the production efforts of farmers
and fishers can only be monetised at
markets within a short radius, dictated by
the perishability of the produce. Without
cold-chain, all efforts for greater produc-
tion and productivity comes to naught in
real terms. With cold-chain, their selling
radius extends and through market
We were greatly
enabled to pioneer
excellence in a
short time span,
but of late NCCD
did face some
forced challenges.
expansion they can find growth. With
cold-chain connectivity they can have a
choice among markets, and can directly
connect with markets afar. This ensures
the production can translate into optimal
economic gains. Plus, awareness of
nutritional wellbeing means a steady
demand for fresh food items.
There is no alternate to cold-chain,
at least so far, until we have 3D printers
for fresh food and medicines. As more
populations drift away from food produc-
tion, they add load on the agricultural
sector. Without cold-chain, how do we
safeguard our food and health in a harsh
future - cold-chain is vital for civilization
to develop as it will - without cold-chain,
humankind’s progress will get stumped.
Q: So, going back to the first ques-
tion, it seems there is a bit of truth
that at a level something worked to
derail this train? How does it feel,
having set up NCCD and now leaving
it to others?
I feel full, and the fulfilment comes
from knowing that NCCD contributed
best to various important strategies
and decisions at the apex level. As
you know, I entered to contribute pro-
bono with no expectations, certainly
not imagining an 8 year stint, as part of
the establishment that I was not inte-
gral to. I have no regrets here, and it
is satisfying to see NCCD being con-
sidered today as the nodal brain-trust
in this domain. Yes, more and better is
demanded and needed a streamlined
work environment.
You question provokes for specif-
ics. I will respond that, we were greatly
enabled to pioneer excellence in a short
time span, but of late NCCD did face
some forced challenges. Struggling with
crippling indecisions and arbitrariness,
eventually NCCD’s governing bodies
were updated details, and then of my
decision to demit office. The underlying
principle was to keep true to system &
due processes. Remember, there are
numerous in the government who work
resolutely and mutely in this backdrop,
still trying to make a positive difference;
my privilege to have met a few and
shaken their hands.
Let me explain a bit. We all ask to
see progress that makes a difference.
Which is why we increasingly elect
leaders on that basis. The good direc-
tion that our Prime Minister and other
leaders put across, requires relevant
context in implementation. For holis-
tic development and speed, the need
of the hour is to do more through PPP
models, to induct expertise of domain
professionals, and such like. These are
recognised necessities today, and are
fully facilitated. But sometimes, if a facil-
itator loses track, then this agenda can
get grossly undermined. Any PPP like
NCCD is at core a wilful collaboration,
and we must keep score of this essenti-
ality - it has to be guarded against mis-
appropriation and nurtured constantly. If
not, instead of the partners being equal,
the PPP becomes a one-sided affair,
and the working eco-system gets intol-
erably confused.
The confusion is equally evident in
the non-governmental stakeholders,
the other ‘P’ in PPP. The private sector,
tends to be partial in involvement, for all
its talk of nation building. Those in this
sector are not ready, or strong enough,
to take up cudgels to counter arbitrary
red-tape; instead they try to adjust and
play safe. This half-hearted participa-
tion normalises individual overbearing
conduct and taken advantage of. There
are limitations to people in the govern-
ment, and we need more of the private
DRIVERS DUNIYA ▪ India's First Driver Focused Magazine
sector to step up and take charge and
burden where government cannot. All of
us have a role to play in nation building
and it should not be seen as the captive
domain of government employees.
We all know that good ideas are
never sufficient without good implemen-
tation, and implementation is insufficient
unless guided by experienced context.
Such experience is honoured, but as a
people, we still tend to kow-tow more to
a position. As said in my farewell letter,
domain expertise is not assumed with the
chance nomination to an administration
position - the power that stems there, is
transitory and should rightfully be used
to create good value, and not nuisance
value. Similarly, any strength of knowl-
edge should be used to improve the lot
of others and not merely for personal
gain. The collective capabilities should
be used wholesomely and not in con-
fused or roughshod ways. Like how cold-
chain should optimally be used to make
the most of the transitory time to connect
value with demand, rather than to hoard &
control the supply. NCCD demonstrated
such possibilities, as it got evolved into a
think-tank of repute, a collaboration of the
people and for the people.
So, to repeat, my heart is full and
I feel gratified for being enabled to
establish NCCD, and for so many who
supported the path changing works we
were able to accomplish.
Q: What do you say for the next
CEO of NCCD? And what comes next
for you?
The position of CEO in NCCD is
designed to be held by a senior indus-
try professional. Unfortunately, NCCD
has not passed on to another, though I
assume one such will be selected in the
future. I hope its next leader will have
ample domain experience to support
its stakeholders in taking a direction
that makes even better sense for the
farmers, operators and consumers.
NCCD was not mandated its author-
ity, which was established only through
the credible force of its works and that
too should be upheld. Most importantly,
he or he should ardently strive to keep
NCCD’s unique PPP nature alive and as
a body where knowledge collaborates
and reigns supreme.
I had not really figured my “next” yet.
There is enough under my sleeves and
maybe there will be other places and
opportunities to contribute… or maybe
I am due a quiet fade out…
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