Every year, around harvest season, India celebrates its agricultural output. And there is a genuine reason to — 357.73 million tonnes of foodgrain in 2024–25 is no small feat for a country feeding 1.4 billion people. Governments announce it. Newspapers carry it. And then, quietly, the farmer goes back to worrying about his loan.

That disconnect is not accidental. It points to something structural that production numbers were never designed to capture.

India loses approximately 74 million tonnes of food every year after the crop has already been grown. Not in the field. After it. In transit, in storage, at the mandi, on the loading dock. For fruits and vegetables, the losses are significant — official government-commissioned data puts losses at 6–15 per cent for fruits and 5–12 per cent for vegetables, and the cumulative impact across all perishables is substantial.

When this is discussed in policy circles, it is almost always framed as a food security problem. Reduce waste, feed more people. That framing is not wrong. But it is incomplete — and that incompleteness has real consequences for how solutions get designed and who they actually reach.

Because before it is a food security problem, post-harvest loss is a farmer income problem.

Lack of mechanism

Think about how a smallholder farmer — and over 85 per cent of India’s farmers are smallholders — actually experiences a bad post-harvest season. He does not read a report on tonnes wasted nationally. He sees that his onions have started rotting because the nearest cold storage is full, or too expensive, or too far. He sees that prices in the mandi have crashed because every farmer in the district harvested at the same time and there is no mechanism to stagger supply. He sees that the intermediary buying his produce at the farm gate is pricing in all the risk — spoilage, transport, uncertainty — and that price is coming directly out of his share.

The loss is not abstract. It lands on him, specifically, in the form of income that was grown but never earned.

This distinction matters because the solutions look different depending on which problem you think you are solving. If post-harvest loss is primarily a food security problem, the instinct is to build large infrastructure — national cold chain corridors, mega warehousing hubs, centralised processing facilities. These are not bad investments. But they have long gestation periods, and they tend to serve the middle and end of the supply chain better than the farm end.

If post-harvest loss is primarily a farmer income problem, the focus shifts. You start asking different questions. Why does a smallholder have no option but to sell immediately at harvest when prices are lowest? Why is there no affordable storage within reach of a cluster of villages? Why does a farmer not know the price difference between the mandi 20 kilometres away and the one 40 km away before he loads his produce onto a truck? Why is last-mile logistics from the farm to the first aggregation point almost entirely informal, undependable, and priced against the farmer?

Service design question

These are not infrastructure questions at the national scale. They are service design questions at the local scale. And they are far more tractable in the near term.

Village-level aggregation, micro cold storage that a group of farmers can collectively access, better real-time market information, coordination on harvest timing to avoid gluts — none of these require massive capital. They require the supply chain to be designed with the farmer’s position in mind, not just the consumer’s convenience or the processor’s efficiency.

The ₹1.5 lakh crore in annual post-harvest losses that researchers estimate is not a statistic that lives in a government report. It is distributed across millions of farm households as the difference between a viable season and a debt that rolls over into the next one.

Reframing this as an income story does not make the food security argument weaker. It makes the intervention more honest. Because when a farmer earns more by losing less, more food reaches the market, at better quality, at more stable prices.

The production record is real. But what a farmer actually earns is determined not by what he grows, but by how much of it survives the journey from field to market — and what price he receives when it gets there.

That journey is where the income gap is quietly forming, season after season. And it is long past time that received the same attention as the harvest itself.

The author is Founder, Farmneed Agribusiness Private Limited

Published on June 27, 2026