Schematic state map (approximate geography, not to scale). Each tile: lead grain/feedstock (left-border colour), covered storage (green bar, LMT · S) · SFAC FPOs (gold bar · F) · FCI depots (owned+hired warehouse count · D). The point: the storage belt and the FPO belt are different states — Madhya Pradesh is the one with both, and Punjab has 569 FCI depots but only 78 FPOs.
India — where the grain, the storage, and the farmers are
Why two different maps are layered on top of each other here
Grain storage and farmer aggregation are usually reported as separate statistics, but they answer two different questions about the same geography: storage capacity says where the government's own procurement machinery has physically built out, while Farmer Producer Organisation (FPO) counts say where farmers themselves have organised into collective-bargaining units. This map deliberately overlays both, because they don't track each other — and the states where they diverge are more informative than the states where they align. Madhya Pradesh is the one state combining both at scale (200 LMT of covered storage and 348 FPOs), which is part of why it's become the single largest wheat-procuring state nationally in recent seasons. Punjab, by contrast, carries the legacy of the Green Revolution's procurement infrastructure — 569 FCI depots, the most of any state — but only 78 FPOs, meaning its grain economy still runs largely through direct mandi/APMC procurement rather than farmer-collective aggregation. Uttar Pradesh inverts that pattern almost completely: 758 FPOs, more than any other state, sitting alongside a comparatively thin storage footprint.
The FPO programme behind the gold bars
The FPO counts on this map sit inside a specific, named Central Sector Scheme: "Formation and Promotion of 10,000 Farmer Producer Organisations," launched by the Prime Minister on 29 February 2020 with a ₹6,865 crore outlay running through 2027-28, implemented through the Small Farmers' Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC) working with state governments. Each FPO is eligible for financial assistance of up to ₹18 lakh over three years, a matching equity grant of up to ₹15 lakh, and a credit guarantee of up to ₹2 crore per project loan from eligible lending institutions — support explicitly designed to let farmer collectives access markets, inputs, and credit at a scale an individual smallholder can't reach alone. The scheme hit its nationwide 10,000th-FPO milestone in February 2025 (all 10,000 were registered by 1 March 2026, according to a Lok Sabha reply), with the milestone organisation itself registered in Khagaria, Bihar, built around maize, banana, and paddy. The state-by-state unevenness this map shows — UP and Bihar's FPO density against Punjab's comparative thinness on this specific metric — reflects how unevenly that national target has actually landed on the ground, not a uniform rollout.
What the storage side represents instead
The green storage bars are a different, older infrastructure layer entirely: covered grain storage capacity FCI operates directly or hires, drawn from DFPD's Foodgrain Bulletin. That capacity is itself split across ownership types nationally — state agencies including the State Warehousing Corporations hold the largest share, FCI's own godowns are the second-largest, and the remainder is hired through the Central Warehousing Corporation, the Private Entrepreneur Guarantee scheme, and other arrangements — a mix this blog's separate reporting on FCI's procurement-to-disposal pipeline covers in more detail. This map's point in showing storage and FPOs side by side isn't that one is better than the other; it's that a state can be strong on either axis without being strong on both, and a district or state's actual grain economy is shaped by which combination it has — procurement infrastructure without farmer organisation still moves grain, but on terms set upstream of the farmer, while dense FPO coverage without matching storage capacity means farmers have collective bargaining power but limited local capacity to hold their own crop off the market.
India — where the grain, the storage, and the farmers are
Real India state boundaries, shaded by FCI covered-storage capacity (owned + hired CWC/SWC/PEG/private, DFPD Foodgrain Bulletin, Nov-2024). Darker = more storage. The ranked list on the right adds SFAC FPO counts — the point of the whole exercise: the storage belt and the FPO belt are different states. Madhya Pradesh has both (200 LMT storage, 348 FPOs); Punjab has 174 LMT of storage but only 78 FPOs; Uttar Pradesh has 758 FPOs (the most of any state) but a fraction of MP's storage.
What would fix this
- The Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare should publish one state-wise FPO registry covering every promoting agency, not only SFAC's channel, so the 3,649 SFAC-registered FPOs on this map can be set against the roughly 45,000 FPOs said to exist across India.
- The Department of Food and Public Distribution should publish state-wise covered storage capacity by agency and channel in the Foodgrain Bulletin, in a table that sums to the all-India total, so state figures reconcile with the roughly 841 LMT national figure instead of standing as illustrative snapshots.
- SFAC should publish, for each FPO formed under the 10,000-FPO scheme, whether it has received the management grant, the equity grant and a credit-guaranteed loan, and whether it filed accounts last year, so the scheme's milestone is measured in working FPOs, not registrations.
- The Uttar Pradesh government should publish how much State Warehousing Corporation capacity FPOs can hire, at what rates, and how much they actually used each season, so the state with 758 FPOs and a thin storage footprint can see whether its collectives can hold crop off the market.
These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.
About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.
