Mushroom subsidy in West Bengal

West Bengal, VERIFIED 2026-09-13, and not from the department's own website, which has not answered a single request since this project's very first pass reached it. The document is the Government of India's own approval of West Bengal's Annual Action Plan under MIDH, published on a central host that is up and complete where the state's is not.

It opens with the signed approval letter: File No. 33-24/2017-MIDH (AAP), Horticulture Division, Krishi Bhawan, dated 19th September 2019, signed by M.K. Mishra, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, and addressed to the "Mission Director/Director (Hort.), West Bengal State Horticulture Development Society, Department of Food Processing Industries & Horticulture, Mayukh Bhavan (Top Floor), Bidjannagar, Kolkata - 700091", the department this record already named, at its own address, with the letter reproducing the misspelling of Bidhannagar itself. It approves implementation of the National Horticulture Mission under MIDH in the State during 2019-20 with a total outlay of Rs 5,333.28 lakh, split 60% Government of India to 40% State, and it 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."

That single sentence closes a gap this record has carried since its first pass. West Bengal's own umbrella department states, in its Section 4(1)(b) RTI proactive disclosure, that "There is no subsidy programme running under this Department directly but Directorate of Horticulture, Directorate of Food Processing Industries and Directorate of COMP are implementing various subsidy related schemes like RKVY and MIDH", the department saying it runs nothing of its own and names MIDH as what its directorates run. This letter is the other half of that: MIDH, running here, on MIDH's own cost norms. The state does not set a mushroom rate because there is no state mushroom rate to set.

WHAT THE APPROVED TABLE PRINTS, AND WHY NO RULE IS RECORDED FROM IT. Item "Mushrooms" of the 2019-20 table carries a production unit row under a column headed "Maximum permissible cost", entering "Rs. 20.00 lakh/ unit" for both the public sector at 100% of cost and the private sector at 40% "as credit linked back ended subsidy". Those are the superseded CENTRAL norms, not West Bengal's own schedule: the current central guideline prices the same production unit at Rs 30 lakh. This atlas sets out where the older figure comes from under "The Rs 20 lakh figure is the old central one" in How it works. Publishing it here as a West Bengal rate would manufacture a state schedule out of a central one and understate what a grower here can claim, so no rule is recorded at those figures, and none at the current central figures either, since Term II binds this plan to the guidelines as they stood in 2019, and a 2019 letter cannot speak for what a 2026 application will be assessed against. What a grower here should take to the department is the central guideline in force, which this site publishes in full.

THE COMPONENT WENT QUIET, THEN CAME BACK. The 2019-20 plan prints the mushroom norms and allocates nothing against them: every figure on the row is 0.00, and the sub-total for mushrooms is 0.00. The 2021-22 plan is barer still, keeping the "Mushrooms" heading and its nil sub-total while dropping the component rows altogether. By the 2024-25 plan the component is funded again, and at some scale: one public and two private mushroom production units, and one public and one private spawn making unit: five units against Rs 57.00 lakh in all. So West Bengal's mushroom component is not a dead letter that survives only on paper. It is a real budget line that was empty for at least two of the years read here and is not empty now.

WHY THE STATUS IS "unknown" RATHER THAN ACTIVE. The most recent plan read is 2024-25, two financial years back, and it is a planning document rather than a current sanction. More to the point, the state's own machinery remains unreadable: wbfpih.wb.gov.in read once, on this project's first pass, and has not responded to a single request in the three passes since, failing at the TCP connection stage rather than returning anything at all; and the two guideline PDFs the directorate's own page links (its "NHM guideline" and its "MIDH Guideline") are served through a dynamic download endpoint that the Internet Archive captured the links to but never followed, so neither has ever been retrievable, live or archived. Nothing in this record rests on that department's site; but nothing in this record can confirm what that site would say today either.

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.

ON READING A BAD SCAN. This document is a scan with a poor text layer, pdftotext renders its "100%" as "1 00o/o" and its "40%" as "40olo", so every figure quoted here was read off a rendered page image rather than the extracted text, including the printed date, which is fully written out as "19th September, 2019" and is the only complete printed date among the approval letters in this set.

EARLIER PASSES, kept for what they ruled out rather than what they found. A sweep of the directorate's own upload folder recovered ten PDFs the site did serve successfully: nine are corporation tender notices, area and production statistics and survey reports with no mushroom content, and the tenth is the RTI disclosure quoted above. Forty NABARD-drafted "Model Project Profiles" served through the same download wrapper are bankable-DPR templates for the Directorate of Food Processing, not for horticulture's cultivation schemes; one is a mushroom canning-plant template whose only financing line is an unquantified reference to Ministry of Food Processing Industries assistance, which is a processing subsidy and a different question from a cultivation one. A domain-wide search of the wb.gov.in tree for mushroom-named files returns vocational-training material only. Both state agricultural universities run genuine mushroom research and spawn-production training courses, which are curricula, not subsidy rates.