4 min readJun 3, 2026 07:22 AM IST
First published on: Jun 3, 2026 at 06:20 AM IST
On a recent visit to Ladakh, I drove from Leh to Tirith, a village in Nubra, crossing Khardung La to reach a food processing unit in one of the remotest corners of the country. The drive explained the place’s economics better than any report could. Here, altitude, weather and distance are not background conditions; they are built into the price of every product that must leave the valley. Inside the unit, there were no sea buckthorn berries.
It was May, and the harvest had ended months earlier, in the short autumn window when the fruit comes off the bush. What stood there instead were juice and pulp sealed and labelled, and dried berries packed from last autumn’s harvest. The unit also had mobile aseptic processing capacity. That detail stayed with me because it demonstrated the enterprise’s practical intelligence. They had understood the problem clearly: In Ladakh, the crop is brief, the road is long, and the berry cannot wait. So the first act of processing had to be brought closer to the harvest.
Food processing is usually discussed in the language of large plants, investment figures and export targets. In Tirith, the point was narrower and more immediate. The unit showed that enterprise in a remote region is often an answer to necessity.
I had seen the same point earlier in Leh, in the work of Deachen Angmo. A few years ago, she earned Rs 8,000 a month as a wage labourer. Today, she runs K-Top Food Processing, a unit built around sea buckthorn, one of Ladakh’s most difficult crops. She buys the berry from local collectors, turns it into juice, pulp, dried berries and jam under her own brand, and sells to markets well beyond the Union Territory.
Sea buckthorn brings the difficulty and the opportunity into one plant. The shrub grows over cold, thorny ground. The berries are small, soft and hard to pick. The harvest window is short, and once the fruit is off the bush, it cannot wait for processing somewhere distant. It has to be cleaned, pulped, dried or preserved quickly. Delay costs quality, and lost quality costs price. Deachen’s unit grew because the support she received met the crop’s actual needs. Under the Pradhan Mantri Formalisation of Micro Food Processing Enterprises Scheme, she accessed finance and invested in the machinery needed to process sea buckthorn quickly, package it properly and sell it under her own brand.
A woman who once worked as a wage labourer now runs an enterprise with a turnover in crores, employs workers, and sustains a supply chain linked to local collectors and families in her own community. Her unit also points to the larger gap. To make such examples less rare, local processors need finance, machinery and formal support before a perishable crop can become a marketable product. PMFME has helped create that starting point in Ladakh: Under the scheme, 101 loans have been sanctioned, and 89 have been disbursed to micro food processing units across the Union Territory, and seed capital assistance of Rs 1.81 crore has been approved for 651 SHG members.
A single enterprise may process a local crop, but it cannot alone provide storage, testing, packaging, branding, market access and larger shared facilities. That requires common infrastructure. Under PMFME, common incubation centres have been approved for sea buckthorn processing in Leh and apricot processing in Kargil, giving local producers access to facilities that would otherwise remain beyond their individual reach. Shared infrastructure addresses one part of the gap. Collective support and product identity address another. That is why branding and marketing support have been approved for sea buckthorn products under “Wonder Berry” and apricot products under “Kargil Gold”.
Deachen Angmo’s journey from a wage labourer to the head of a thriving multi-crore enterprise is powerful proof of what happens when local potential meets the right institutional support. The ultimate goal of our efforts is not just to celebrate a single success story, but to replicate it across every valley.
The writer is Cabinet Minister of Food Processing Industries of India