Mushroom subsidy in Jharkhand

Jharkhand, VERIFIED 2026-09-13, and the document that did it settles a question this record has been circling for four passes. Jharkhand's Directorate of Horticulture publishes no mushroom scheme of its own; every mushroom-related document earlier passes found here was either a re-hosted central guideline or a table of unit counts and outlays. The reason turns out to be simple, and the Government of India's own approved plan for the State says it.

The document is the approved MIDH Annual Action Plan of Jharkhand for 2022-23, published on the central mission's own host. Unlike Puducherry's and West Bengal's, it carries no covering approval letter, it is the approved component table itself, headed "Annual Action Plan of Jharkhand, 2022-23", with its financial columns split "GOI Share 60%" and "State Share 40%". At item 5, "Mushrooms", it funds all three components in both sectors: production unit, spawn making unit and compost making unit, nine units against Rs 99.00 lakh, of which Rs 59.40 lakh is the central share and Rs 39.60 lakh the State's. Beside each row, under a column headed "Maximum permissible cost", sit the figures Rs 20.00 lakh, Rs 15 lakh and Rs 20.00 lakh per unit, at 100% of cost to the public sector and 40% to the private sector "for meeting the expenditure on infrastructure, as credit linked back ended subsidy".

A DECLINED INFERENCE, NOW SOURCED, AND STILL NOT A JHARKHAND RATE. An earlier pass found the Directorate's own State Horticulture Mission target table, tied to departmental orders 16 of 19.10.2020 and 38 of 22.10.2020, carrying two mushroom rows: five public-sector spawn making units against Rs 75.00 lakh, and six public-sector compost making units against Rs 120.00 lakh. Divide either and you get Rs 15 lakh and Rs 20 lakh a unit. That pass did the division, saw how plausible the answers looked, and refused to publish them on the ground that dividing an outlay by a unit count is not reading a rate off a document. This plan prints both figures outright, in the cost column, for exactly those two components, so the arithmetic was right. The refusal was still correct, and for a reason better than caution: the figures it declined to publish are not Jharkhand's. Rs 20 lakh, Rs 15 lakh and Rs 20 lakh are the superseded CENTRAL cost norms, the ones the current central guideline replaced with Rs 30 lakh, Rs 20 lakh and Rs 30 lakh, and this atlas sets that out in full under "The Rs 20 lakh figure is the old central one" in How it works. Publishing them in 2020 as a derived Jharkhand schedule would have produced a wrong number by a wrong method; publishing them now as a printed Jharkhand schedule would produce the same wrong number by a better method. Neither is recorded here.

Nor is a rule recorded at the current central figures. This is an approved plan for a financial year, not an open-ended statement that Jharkhand follows whatever the central norm happens to be, and nothing in the State's own paperwork says the latter: a search of the Finance Department's FY2026-27 Detailed Demand for Grants for Agriculture, 32.96 MB, 16,697 lines, read in full, returns nothing at all for "mushroom", "MIDH", "norms of", "pattern of" or "Mission for Integrated". What a grower here should take to the Directorate is the central guideline in force, which this site publishes with its own evidence.

THE COMPONENT IS LIVE, AND HAS BEEN FOR YEARS. The identical mushroom block, at the identical nine units and Rs 99.00 lakh, is in the 2021-22 plan as well, with a further three units and Rs 37.00 lakh of spill-over carried into 2022-23, so this is not a line item that was budgeted once. By the 2024-25 plan the same three components are funded again at the same shape, one public and two private units each, in a format that prints no cost-norm column at all. Jharkhand's own budgeting apparatus tracks the component the same way from the other side: the Finance Department's FY2026-27 Outcome Budget carries a "MUSHROOM KIT" output row with a target of 150,000 and a unit of measurement printed as "Number", and a 2025-26 row for "Mushroom Cultivation and training" at 3,500 against 3,500 achieved. Counts and beneficiaries, never a printed per-unit rupee rate, in two separate State documents six years apart.

WHY THE STATUS IS "unknown" RATHER THAN ACTIVE. The most recent approved plan read here is 2024-25, two financial years back, and it is a plan rather than a current sanction. The Directorate's own site, re-crawled for this pass, still carries only four PDFs on its schemes-and-guidelines page, two identical copies of an NHB commercial-horticulture file, the National Bamboo Mission guidelines, and a mirror of the central MIDH guideline, and its scheme sub-pages carry aggregate outlay tables with no component breakdown. Nothing on it would tell a grower what is open this year.

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 State's own host has the opposite problem and is worth flagging for anyone who tries it: horticulture.jharkhand.gov.in serves a broken TLS chain, so a strict fetcher reports a live site as dead.

EARLIER PASSES, kept for what they ruled out. The Directorate publishes no Jharkhand-authored mushroom scheme document: the four PDFs above are the whole of its schemes listing, its homepage carries no mushroom mention, its "Important Documents" and "Sanction Orders" listings hold four unrelated files between them, and no alternate departmental domain resolves. The Internet Archive holds no capture of horticulture.jharkhand.gov.in at any point in its history. The agriculture department's archive has exactly one mushroom-named file, a buyer contact list. Neither the ICAR KVK portal nor Birsa Agricultural University resolves today, so neither could be checked.