Mushroom subsidy in Punjab

Punjab, VERIFIED 2026-09-13 for the mushroom component Punjab runs under central MIDH, and still NOT FOUND for the State's own separately named mushroom scheme. Both halves of that sentence matter, and this record would be dishonest without either.

WHAT WAS READ. The document is the approved MIDH Annual Action Plan of Punjab for 2021-22, published on the central mission's own host. Like Jharkhand's and unlike Puducherry's or West Bengal's, it carries no covering approval letter: it is the approved component table itself, headed "Annual Action Plan of 2021-22 for Punjab", with its financial columns split "GOI Share 60%" and "State Share 40%". At item 5, "Mushrooms", it funds all three components, all in the private sector: ten production units against Rs 80.00 lakh, three spawn making units against Rs 18.00 lakh and ten compost making units against Rs 80.00 lakh, twenty-three units and Rs 178.00 lakh in all, with a further four units and Rs 29.66 lakh of spill-over. Beside each row, under a column headed "Maximum permissible cost", sit 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".

Those three figures are the superseded CENTRAL cost norms, not Punjab's. This is in fact the very document this atlas already cites, on the page explaining where that older figure comes from, as proof that it is central rather than any one state's: unrelated states print it identically because the centre set it. The current central guideline prices the same three components at Rs 30 lakh, Rs 20 lakh and Rs 30 lakh. No rule is recorded here at the old figures, and none at the new ones either: an approved plan for one financial year is not an open-ended statement that Punjab follows whatever the central norm happens to be, and nothing in the State's own paperwork says so. Earlier passes searched its State Plan Scheme listing and its Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana page in full for "MIDH", "as per", "norms" and "pattern of" and found not one match. What a grower here should take to the department is the central guideline in force, which this site publishes with its own evidence.

WHAT IS STILL MISSING, SAID PLAINLY. Punjab names a mushroom scheme of its own. An archived capture of the Department of Horticulture's "State Plan Scheme" page lists "2022-23 - Financial Assistance to Mushroom Cultivation in the State", in English and Punjabi, linking a PDF of that name. That PDF has returned HTTP 500 on every pass of this project, and the Internet Archive has never once captured it, not a file recently lost, a file that may never have served successfully even when it was first linked. So this atlas has never read Punjab's own mushroom scheme, and the Annual Action Plan does not stand in for it: the plan is the centre's, it prices the central components, and it says nothing whatever about whatever Punjab funds under its own State Plan head. Anyone reading this record should understand it as covering the MIDH stream only. The department's own site cannot help: its homepage is now a five-kilobyte placeholder with a single "PH Admin Login" link and no navigation to schemes or documents at all, and every other path on the domain returns HTTP 500, so the backend is broken site-wide rather than one file being missing.

A LEAD, RECORDED BECAUSE IT IS REAL AND NOT UNDERSTOOD. Punjab's 2023-24 plan drops the three standard mushroom components entirely and funds, in their place, a single line that appears nowhere else in this project: "Integrated Mushrooms unit for spawn & compost production", public sector, 3,059 units against Rs 120.00 lakh, with a further 6,008 units and Rs 119.52 lakh carried over from 2022-23. That format prints no cost norm for anything, so the plan gives no price for it. Three thousand units against Rs 120 lakh plainly cannot be the Rs 20 lakh production unit, and that is the whole of what can responsibly be said: the outlay column is a budget line, not a price, and dividing one by the other here would produce a number no document prints. What this component actually is, this atlas does not know and will not guess. By the 2024-25 plan it is gone again and the three standard components are back, private sector only, twelve production units, two spawn units and ten compost units against Rs 188.00 lakh.

WHY THE STATUS IS "unknown" RATHER THAN ACTIVE. The most recent plan read is 2024-25, two financial years back, and it is a plan rather than a current sanction; the State's own scheme document has never been readable; and the department's website has been broken across every pass. Three separate reasons, none of which this record can resolve on its own.

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.

EARLIER PASSES, kept for what they ruled out. The department's own "Mushroom Lab" page, recovered from a 2022 capture, describes government spawn laboratories at Patiala and Jalandhar selling spawn bottles to farmers at a fixed Rs 15 per 250g bottle, an input price list, not a beneficiary subsidy rate, and not a substitute for the missing scheme document. The general agriculture department's site is live and functional but links Horticulture straight back to the broken domain, and its one scheme PDF is the Crop Diversification Programme. No alternate departmental domain resolves, and no proactive-disclosure page exists anywhere in the domain's 1,130-URL archive history.