Policy watch
What changed in this ledger, and why
Corrections and findings, each dated and tied to the document that settled it, not release notes about the website. This is the site showing its work.
Most recent, 14 September 2026
We were publishing a superseded NHB rate, and it understated a mushroom grower by most of a crore
This atlas published NHB’s mushroom entitlement as 40% of project cost capped at ₹30 lakh, read from an undated guideline whose cost-norm annexure is headed for a plan period that ended in 2017. NHB has since issued Operational Guidelines effective 01.01.2025 that give the integrated mushroom unit a clause of its own, priced per tonne of installed capacity, with no rupee ceiling on the component at all, and a Public Circular dated 21 August 2026 that cut the rate from 40%/50% to 35%/45%. At the 300 MT ceiling that is ₹89,25,000 in a general area and ₹1,14,75,000 in an enhanced-rate one, against the ₹30,00,000 this site was showing. The correction matters beyond bookkeeping: a grower told by a vendor that NHB pays "up to ₹1 crore" was answered here that the claim was false, on the strength of a cap that no longer exists. It was our answer that was wrong. Both documents are now archived here in full, and the superseded one is kept and named as superseded rather than deleted, because its ₹30 lakh figure is still widely quoted.
Document: National Horticulture Board Operational Guidelines JANUARY 2025
14 September 2026
NHB now bars building before clearance, and only one member of a family may ever claim
Two conditions arrived with the same rebuild and neither existed in the guideline this site had been reading. NHB’s Operational Guidelines now state that commencement of any project works at site before Grant of Clearance is not permitted and shall lead to rejection of the application, the In-Principle Approval, by contrast, is no longer mandatory, so it is the clearance that gates construction, not the approval. Separately, the Public Circular of 21 August 2026 redefines "family" as the applicant’s spouse, father, mother, sons and daughters, and allows only one member of it to avail assistance under any NHB scheme or component, irrespective of any unutilised portion of the ceiling. It also bars serving government employees above Group-D, pensioners drawing ₹10,000 a month or more, holders of constitutional posts and elected representatives, and groups of farmers, from applying at all.
14 September 2026
NHB and MIDH are mutually exclusive on one project, which this atlas had recorded as unconfirmed
Until now this site recorded the question of whether a grower may draw both NHB and MIDH on one mushroom project as unconfirmed, because the NHB guideline then in hand genuinely did not address it and inferring an answer from silence is the one move this ledger refuses. The January 2025 guideline addresses it twice, in the same words both times: the schemes of NHB and the schemes under MIDH, including NHM, are mutually exclusive, and assistance can be claimed under only one scheme for a single project. That is a project-level bar, not a component-level one. NHB’s own declaration form separately names RKVY, so that verdict moves too. What has not changed is the discipline: the verdicts moved because a document said so, and the reasoning that produced the old answer is kept on the record rather than quietly replaced.
Document: National Horticulture Board Operational Guidelines JANUARY 2025
14 September 2026
The cold storage ceiling everyone quotes is ₹7.50 crore. It is now ₹2.00 crore.
NHB Scheme No. 2’s own currency had been an open question on this site: the document held for it printed no date and its cost-norm table was headed for the XII Plan period, so its ₹7.50 crore ceiling was cited only as a figure in circulation, never as a rate. That question is now closed in both directions. Cold storage is Chapter 03 of the January 2025 guideline, which is dated and current, and the Public Circular of 21 August 2026 provides that the maximum subsidy admissible from NHB for any type of cold storage project shall not exceed ₹2.00 crore, at 35% in general areas and 45% in NER and Himalayan States, Scheduled Areas, Vibrant Villages and the islands. The 5,001 MT capacity floor that puts this scheme out of reach of a mushroom farm’s own cold room is confirmed by the current document too.
12 September 2026
The MIDH low-cost unit's credit-linkage silence is now answered by two states, not by MIDH itself
MIDH’s own text on the low-cost/small-scale mushroom production unit never says whether a bank loan is required for it. Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, the two state implementing authorities administering this exact MIDH component, both state in writing that a bank loan is not required. Recorded as a rule-level credit-linkage waiver cited to those two states, not folded into MIDH’s own evidence, because corroboration from the states that administer a scheme is not the same fact as the scheme’s own document saying so, and the two must not be blurred.
12 September 2026
Maharashtra verified: a scanned 2019-20 guidance note, read from the page images after its OCR text layer proved unreliable
The extracted text underneath this document is a legacy, non-Unicode Marathi font mapped onto Latin codepoints, not decodable by keyword search. A fresh, Devanagari-aware OCR pass was cross-checked against the rendered page images themselves, because that OCR pass independently produced at least one visible digit error a plain image read catches. Every rupee figure and clause on Maharashtra’s state page comes from the image, not the OCR text alone.
Document: Mushroom Spawn / Production / Compost Making Unit, Guidance Note 2019-2020
12 September 2026
Himachal Pradesh verified: a scanned 2019 guideline, read from the page images after its OCR misread two rupee figures
The document’s OCR text layer misreads the Small Scale unit’s ₹50,000 assistance figure and the Spawn making unit’s ₹6,00,000 figure, both confirmed wrong against the actual page image. Every rupee figure on Himachal Pradesh’s state page was read off the rendered page image, not the OCR text, for exactly that reason.
Document: Guidelines for Himachal Khumb Vikas Yojna (HKVY) 2019-20
12 September 2026
Karnataka verified: a 2025-26 implementation guideline, undated on every page
The document carries a file/inward-registration number on every page, but no separate issuance date anywhere. Verified against its own Cost Norms and Pattern of Assistance table, which prices the same four mushroom components as the central MIDH guideline.
Document: Karnataka MIDH mushroom development implementation guidelines 2025-26
12 September 2026
Odisha verified: a Women SHG mushroom mission incentive, undated like NHB Scheme No. 1
This Annexure prints its own five-year coverage window instead of an issuance date, and no day or month is printed anywhere else in the document either. Verified for its Area Expansion component; four sibling components in the same Annexure were left unmodelled because the document never names which existing scheme part-funds them.
Document: Empowerment of Women in Agriculture, Promotion of Entrepreneurship for Women SHG (Mushroom Mission)
11 September 2026
Andhra Pradesh verified: the ledger's first state record
Andhra Pradesh’s own MIDH implementation guideline prices the same three components as the central scheme, plus the low-cost unit’s own explicit statement that a bank loan is not required for that one row, since corrected onto MIDH’s own record too, cited to this document.
Document: IMPLEMENATION GUIDELINES 2025 MISSION FOR INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT OF HORTICULTURE (MIDH)
11 September 2026
MIDH’s credit-linkage escapes recorded: an earlier version of this ledger stated the rule too plainly
MIDH’s Annexure V closing Note carries two escapes this ledger had not recorded: subsidy need not be credit linked for public sector units, panchayats, cooperatives, registered societies, trusts and public limited companies who can fund the rest themselves, and credit linkage is optional outright for any project up to ₹30 lakh. A self-funded applicant above that ceiling still draws ₹0, and the calculator’s blocker now reflects the escapes rather than blocking every self-funded project regardless of size or institution.
Document: OPERATIONAL GUIDELINES MISSION FOR INTEGRATED DEVELOPMET OF HORTICULTURE
11 September 2026
PMKSY recorded as excluded by scope, not by silence
PMKSY’s Integrated Cold Chain scheme names no crop at all, but its own Objective clause funds “non-horticulture produce, dairy, meat, poultry, and marine/ fish (except shrimp)”. Mushroom is a horticulture crop, so this scheme excludes it by its own stated scope, not because the document is silent on the point. Recorded with noMushroomComponent and a citation to the exact clause, rather than left pending.
11 September 2026
SMAM corrected from pending to verified: crop-agnostic, horticultural machinery in scope
A full-text search of SMAM’s guideline for "mushroom" returns zero hits, the same shape of trap that first misread NHB Scheme No. 1. SMAM is a machinery scheme, not a crop scheme, and its own post-harvest and value-addition equipment list is explicitly captioned for horticulture. Recording it as having no mushroom component would have told every mushroom grower in India a live scheme has nothing for them, when its individual-ownership route, funded by direct benefit transfer rather than a bank loan, does.
Document: SUB-MISSION ON AGRICULTURAL MECHANIZATION (SMAM) OPERATIONAL GUIDELINES - 2024
11 September 2026
NHB Scheme No. 1 corrected from "no mushroom component" to ₹30 lakh (since superseded)
An earlier read of this document checked only the crop-specific cost-norm appendices, found no mushroom line in either, and stopped there. Both appendices carry an identical Note directing an unpriced category back to MIDH’s own cost norms, and the Eligible Projects clause separately names mushroom production units under the same "open field" category Annexure I, Item A.1 prices directly: 40% of project cost, limited to ₹30 lakh in a general area. Corrected once the fallback Note and the Eligible Projects clause were read together, not the appendix table alone. SUPERSEDED on 14 September 2026: the document behind this entry has been replaced by NHB’s Operational Guidelines effective 01.01.2025, which price the mushroom unit per tonne of installed capacity and set no rupee ceiling on it. The ₹30 lakh figure in this entry is kept because it is what this site published at the time, and because it is still widely quoted; it is not the rate today. See the entries dated 14 September 2026 above.
11 September 2026
MIDH 2025 read end to end: four mushroom rules recorded, including the low-cost unit
The Operational Guidelines’ Annexure V, item III prices four separate rows for mushroom cultivation: the production unit, the compost unit and the spawn lab at a ₹20 to ₹30 lakh cost norm each, and a fourth, lower-cost route funded per 200 sq ft structure rather than against a lump project cost, capped at five structures per beneficiary. All four are now in the ledger with their own rule records, not summarised as one figure.
Document: OPERATIONAL GUIDELINES MISSION FOR INTEGRATED DEVELOPMET OF HORTICULTURE