Stating that special emphasis would be given to training farmers and other stakeholders, he said: 'Our effort would be to train and empower five lakh (500,000) women entrepreneurs. There are around 550 parliamentary constituencies in the country and our effort would be to train 1,000 women from each parliamentary constituency.'

The minister added that the wastage of agricultural produce has been brought down from Rs.580 billion to Rs.500 billion.

'It is regrettable that at a time when the entire world was concerned about food security, India was wasting 50 percent of its food due to lack of food processing capabilities,' Sahai said.

FICCI secretary general Amit Mitra called for launching a collective endeavour in R&D in the food processing sector.

K. Rajeswara Rao, joint secretary at the food processing ministry, gave details of the ministry's action plan for R&D.

These include: treating R&D as a priority area, industry's participation to ensure demand-driven R&D projects and a coordinated approach towards R&D among research institutes, universities, entrepreneurs, farmers and other stakeholders.

In the workshop, two technical sessions were held followed by a panel discussion. Key stakeholders from academia and the industry shared their experience in R&D work and also discussed opportunities and bottlenecks in such work.