Mushroom subsidy in Puducherry

Puducherry, VERIFIED 2026-09-13, from the Government of India's own approval of this Union Territory's Annual Action Plan. Three prior passes could not find a document that prices Puducherry's mushroom component, and this pass has not found one either. What it found is better: the instrument that settles which scheme prices it, and therefore why the UT itself never does.

The document is the approved MIDH Annual Action Plan for 2021-22, and it opens with the signed approval letter itself, File No. 33-55/2021-MIDH (AAP), Horticulture Division, Krishi Bhawan, addressed to the "Mission Director/Director (Hort.), Union Territory of Puducherry, Botanical Garden, Puducherry - 605001", the same office this record already named. It conveys approval to implement the National Horticulture Mission under MIDH in the UT during 2021-22 with a total outlay of Rs 295.97 lakh, at a GOI share of 100%, and it binds that spending in its own words at Term III: "Expenditure on approved activities must be in conformity with the cost norms laid down in the operational guidelines of the scheme."

That is the missing link the earlier passes were looking for. The 2023 notice this record used to rest on invited applications "under the National Horticulture Mission" and named a mushroom production hut among its components without printing a single figure; this is the NHM/MIDH instrument behind that stream, it names Puducherry, and it says the cost norms are the scheme's, not the UT's. Puducherry's own Standard Operating Procedure prices its horticulture components down to Rs 1,500 for betelvine and has no mushroom line at all, because it says by its own exception ("Other fruits (not covered under NHM scheme)") that NHM-funded components sit outside it. Those two facts fit together exactly one way: the mushroom component is real here, it runs on the central scheme, and the UT sets no rate of its own for it.

The approved component table proves the same thing a second time, from the other end. Its item 5, "Mushrooms", carries a column headed "Maximum permissible cost" and enters, against the production unit, spawn making unit and compost making unit, the figures Rs 20.00 lakh, Rs 15 lakh and Rs 20.00 lakh per unit, each with the same pattern of assistance: 100% of the cost to the public sector, 40% to the private sector "for meeting the expenditure on infrastructure, as credit linked back ended subsidy". Those are not Puducherry's figures. They are the central cost norms that the current central guideline has since replaced with Rs 30 lakh, Rs 20 lakh and Rs 30 lakh, and this atlas explains where they came from under "The Rs 20 lakh figure is the old central one" in How it works. No rule is recorded here at the old figures: recording them as Puducherry's own schedule would invent a UT rate out of a central one and understate what a grower here can claim.

Nor is a rule recorded at the current central figures, and the reason is worth stating plainly because a reader could reasonably expect one. Term III binds this plan to the operational guidelines as they stood when it was written, and the same letter says at its paragraph 6 that "Continuation of MIDH scheme beyond 31.7.2021 is under consideration and the revised cost norms would be shared after approval", a pointer forward, from the Government of India itself, to norms that had not yet been approved when this was signed. That sentence is enough to show the figures on this plan were the then-current central ones and were expected to move. It is not enough to say what Puducherry's office will apply to an application today, and this atlas does not guess. What a grower here should take to that office is the central guideline in force, which this site publishes in full with its own evidence.

THE TRAP IN THIS TABLE, recorded because it is arithmetically clean and completely wrong. The 2021-22 private-sector production row carries a physical target of 20.0 units against a financial outlay of Rs 12.00 lakh. Divide one by the other and you get Rs 0.60 lakh per unit, which is contradicted by the "Rs. 20.00 lakh/ unit" printed two columns to its left on the same row. The outlay column is a budget line for the year, not a price. No figure in this record is derived by that division, or by any other.

THE COMPONENT IS LIVE, and that is a finding in its own right for a UT whose paperwork had looked stale. Mushroom is funded in three consecutive approved plans: 2021-22 (24 units against Rs 49.00 lakh, public and private, across production and spawn), 2022-23 (10 private production units and 1 private spawn unit, Rs 8.40 lakh), and 2023-24 (15 private production units at Rs 20.00 lakh total and 1 private spawn unit at Rs 3.00 lakh, now split 60% GOI to 40% UT rather than the 100% GOI share of 2021-22). The 2023-24 plan's format drops the cost norm column entirely, so it budgets the component without printing a price for it, which is the same conclusion arrived at from a different direction.

WHY THE STATUS IS "unknown" RATHER THAN ACTIVE. The most recent approved plan read here is 2023-24, three financial years back; the 2023 application notice it corroborates closed on 16.06.2023 and no successor notice has appeared on the department's own notices page in any pass; and the department's own SOP closes with its own warning that "the schemes listed herein are subject to changes without notice" and that a reader must contact the Addl. Director of Agriculture (Horticulture) "for final authentication on the continuation and pattern of assistance of all the schemes". A document was read and it is real. That it is still being run on these terms today is not something this atlas can confirm.

ON THE PRINTED DATE. The letter's date line reads "Dated:" and then, after a gap left blank on the face of the document, "July, 2021" - the day was never filled in. It is recorded here at the month precision the document actually gives. The file also carries a digital signature stamp timestamped 29 July 2021, which is consistent with it but is not a date printed on the letter, and this atlas does not substitute one for the other.

WHERE THE LIVE COPY WENT. midh.gov.in no longer serves any of these plans: the whole site is now an Angular application, and requesting the exact URL above returns HTTP 200 with 25,176 bytes of HTML shell titled "MIDH-Suraksha" rather than the PDF. Checked directly during this pass, on this URL and on two others. A fetcher that trusts a bare 200 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.

EARLIER PASSES, kept because they are what ruled the alternatives out. The 2023 Tamil-language notice was read by rendering it at 300 dpi and reading it directly, the legacy Tamil font having defeated both pdftotext and OCR: Government of Puducherry, Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Department, Horticulture wing, inviting applications for back-ended subsidy under the National Horticulture Mission, listing a mushroom production hut alongside seedling nursery, soil-pit enrichment, power sprayer, pack house, farm pond, transport vehicle and shade-net house, apply via agri.py.gov.in by 16.06.2023. It prints no percentage or rupee figure for any of its components, and its companion application form is a blank fillable scan. The department's live schemes page publishes eight Standard Operating Procedure PDFs, of which "Horticulture SOP.pdf" is the operative one: mango Rs 12,250, guava Rs 5,830, sapota Rs 2,300, other fruits Rs 25,000, coconut Rs 7,500, tapioca Rs 12,500, betelvine Rs 1,500 up to Rs 50,000 per hectare, free vegetable and fruit minikits at 100%, homestead horticulture kits at 75%, plus the Coconut Development Board schemes. No mushroom line in it, nor in "IHDP Mahe SOP.pdf" for the Mahe region.