Container Corporation of India Ltd will shortly be opening a chain of cold storages across the country in a bid to boost agri exports, the corporation's managing director, A K Kohli, said on Thursday.

Talking to businessmen at Vidarbha Industries Association here, Kohli pointed out that India was the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables at 44 million tonne and 88 million tonne per annum respectively. However, exports of these commodities were very low.

Exports stalled because of poor storage and transport facilities. This also led to large-scale wastage. To tackle this, Concor will set up a chain of controlled atmosphere stores. The first store would become operational some time next year.

Concor will also put into service refrigerated containers for transporting fruits and vegetables.

The stores will be set up in technical collaboration with a foreign entity whose identity Kohli declined to disclose. Nagpur will feature in the second stage of the roll-out of the chain.

Kohli said agriculture exports could rise sharply. But foreign buyers demanded quality and the present standards of quality in India were very poor.

Exporters need invest in backward integration and provide intellectual and technical inputs to farmers.

Concor has inland container depots at 52 locations in the country. Another 15-20 were in the pipeline. One at Raipur would be opening next month.

Another ICD would come up at Dadri, Greater Noida, which would be the Asia's largest container depot. This would be in addition to the Tughlaqabad ICD which was operating at over-capacity.

With ICDs at all prominent cities, Concor was now focusing on expanding existing ICDs. To provide better service to customers, Concor has procured high speed wagons for faster movement of goods.

Trains used to take around 120 hours to go from Delhi to Mumbai. This has been reduced to just 44 hours.

The corporation has also put up an IT grid, linked through VSAT, to enable customers to track their container.

Concor has also implemented domestic terminal management system for tracking domestic cargo. An exim terminal management system for monitoring international cargo will be installed soon.

Overseas, Concor has started direct service to Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia and Nepal. Earlier, cargo for Chittagong, in Bangladesh, used to go via Singapore. Now, it went directly, with savings of 30-45 per cent for exporters.