Mushroom subsidy in Arunachal Pradesh

Arunachal Pradesh, VERIFIED 2026-09-13, from the Government of India rather than from the State, because the State has no website to read. Across three passes this project has found the Department of Horticulture unreachable under two different domains: one serves a bare directory listing over https and cPanel's "this domain is not configured" placeholder over http, and the other has no DNS record at all. That is still true. What has changed is that the department's own approved plan does not have to come from the department.

The document is the approval of Arunachal's Annual Action Plan under the Horticulture Mission for North East and Himalayan States, and it opens with the signed letter: F.No. 33-28/2016-MIDH (AAP), Horticulture Division, Krishi Bhawan, dated 01st July 2016, sent by Speed Post to the "Director (Hort.), Department of Horticulture, Government of Arunachal Pradesh, Chimpu, Naharlagun, Arunachal Pradesh: 791110". That address is worth as much as the figures: it is a current, named, physical office for a department with no working web presence at all, which for a grower here is the difference between a dead end and somewhere to walk in with a question. The letter approves implementation of HMNEH under MIDH in the State during 2016-17 at an outlay of Rs 5,755.2 lakh, split 90% Government of India to 10% State, and binds that spending at its Term II: "Expenditure on approved activities shall be in conformity with the norms laid down in the operational guidelines of the scheme."

WHAT THE APPROVED TABLE PRINTS, AND WHY NO RULE IS RECORDED FROM IT. The plan funds mushrooms that year, and only one of the three components: a production unit, public sector, two units, Rs 40.00 lakh, under a column headed "Maximum permissible cost" entering "Rs. 20.00 lakh/ unit" at "100% of the cost." No spawn making unit and no compost making unit appear anywhere in the 2016-17 table. That Rs 20.00 lakh is the superseded CENTRAL norm, not an Arunachal figure; the current central guideline prices the same component at Rs 30 lakh, and this atlas sets out the whole of that under "The Rs 20 lakh figure is the old central one" in How it works. Recording it here as Arunachal's own schedule would invent a state rate out of a central one, so no rule is recorded at that figure, and none at the current central figure either: Term II binds this plan to the guidelines as they stood in 2016, and a 2016 letter cannot speak for what an application is assessed against a decade later.

A DISCREPANCY WORTH SEEING, LEFT UNRESOLVED. The plan's private-sector row prints assistance at 40% of cost, the general-areas rate. The central guideline in force gives North Eastern and Himalayan States 50% on this component, and Arunachal is one of them. So the approved plan and the current central guideline do not agree about what a private mushroom applicant in this State draws. This record says what the approved plan says, names the disagreement, and does not settle it by inference in either direction. The central guideline's own area-class treatment is published on this site with its own evidence, and it is the document to take to the department.

ANOTHER, INSIDE THE SAME FILE. The plan's summary sheet enters the mushroom row's physical target as 0 while carrying the full Rs 40.00 lakh outlay beside it; the detail sheet, five pages later, enters 2.0 units against the identical Rs 40.00 lakh. Both are printed in the same approved document. The figure used here is the detail sheet's, because it is the sheet that names the component, the sector and the cost norm; the summary sheet's 0 is recorded rather than quietly dropped.

THE MONEY WAS REAL, AND SOMEONE AUDITED IT. The Comptroller and Auditor General's compliance audit of Arunachal Pradesh for the year ended 31 March 2020 says the same thing about which scheme is running here, in its own words and from outside both governments: "MIDH is a centrally sponsored Scheme for the holistic growth of the horticulture sector covering fruits, vegetables, roots & tuber crops, mushrooms, spices, flowers, aromatic plants, coconut, cashew, cocoa and Bamboo. Under MIDH, 'Horticulture Mission for North East & Himalayan States (HMNEH)' is one of the sub-schemes implemented in the State." It then records, at its paragraph on activities under Post Harvest Management, that the State Horticulture Mission released Rs 111.75 lakh to a bank in March 2019 for three beneficiaries, itemised in its own footnote as Rs 90.00 lakh for a cold storage at Ziro, Rs 8.00 lakh for a mushroom shed at Sille (Pasighat) and Rs 13.75 lakh for a spice production unit at Namsai, all "under credit linked back ended subsidy". So mushroom money has actually moved here, to a named project, under MIDH's own machinery. That Rs 8.00 lakh is NOT recorded as a rate and must never be: it is a reported disbursement under audit for irregularity, and the very same paragraph shows why the distinction matters, printing both figures for the cold storage beside it and finding that the Rs 90.00 lakh released was more than eleven times the Rs 8.00 lakh the norm allowed. An audited disbursement is evidence that a component exists and is funded. It is not evidence of what it is worth.

WHY THE STATUS IS "unknown" RATHER THAN ACTIVE. The anchor plan is from 2016-17, ten years back. The component is still in the State's plan format in 2021-22, printed across all three rows with the same cost norms, but allocated nothing at all; by 2022-23 the heading survives with a nil sub-total and the rows themselves are gone. Two of the plans read here therefore show the component present and unfunded, and the one that funds it is a decade old. The years in between were not read for this record. The research pass that assembled these documents reports that the 2017-18, 2019-20 and 2020-21 plans are image-only scans in which an OCR sweep surfaced no mushroom row; OCR silence over a scan is far too weak to publish as an absence, and nothing here treats it as one. What those years did is simply not established.

WHERE THE LIVE COPY WENT. midh.gov.in no longer serves these plans: the site is now an Angular application, and the exact URL above answers with HTTP 200 and 25,176 bytes of HTML shell titled "MIDH-Suraksha" instead of a PDF. Verified directly on this URL during this pass, and on two others. A fetcher that checks only the status code will record this document as live. It is not; every copy cited here was recovered from the Internet Archive and its digest re-verified against the capture it came from.

THE DEPARTMENT ITSELF, still unreachable, recorded because a reader may try where we did. horticulture.arunachal.gov.in fails its TLS handshake, and forcing past that returns an Apache directory index with two entries and no site behind it; over plain http the same host redirects to cPanel's stock unconfigured-domain page, which settles it, there is no content behind either protocol. arunhorticulture.nic.in, the domain the State's own agriculture portal still links Horticulture to, has no DNS record whatsoever. The Internet Archive shows arunhorticulture.nic.in was a real working site until 2022, and its own schemes page named "Mushroom production units" among the items its area-expansion programme funded, "implemented by the department of Horticulture as per central guideline and Annual Action Plan approved by SFAC", the same relationship this record now has a signed instrument for, written on the department's own long-dead page. Its guidelines and circulars pages were empty placeholders reading "Contents will be updated soon", and no scheme PDF of any kind was ever captured on that domain. The State's live agriculture portal, agri.arunachal.gov.in, is a genuine current site whose scheme listing carries thirteen dated 2026 documents and no mushroom mention: it is Agriculture, not Horticulture, and the two are separate departments here.