Food that never reaches a plate

India worries about producing enough food. A significant share of what it produces is lost before anyone eats it.

Losses happen at harvest, in storage, in transport and at the mandi — different crops fail at different points. Fruit and vegetables lose most in cold chain gaps; cereals lose most in storage.

Because the loss is distributed across many small steps, it rarely appears as a single headline. Assembling the published estimates by crop and by stage shows where a cold storage unit or a better sack would return the most food per rupee.

What we measure

These are the indicators this topic is built from. Each names its source and the year that source refers to, because an official figure is not the same thing as a current one.

Indicator	Unit	Source and year
Post-harvest loss by crop	% of production	ICAR-CIPHET loss assessmentData year: 2022 study
Loss by stage	% of production	ICAR-CIPHET loss assessmentData year: 2022 study
Cold storage capacity	tonnes, by state	NHB / MoFPIData year: 2024-25
Municipal waste that is organic	% of waste	CPCBData year: 2023-24

What we publish

A crop-by-stage matrix showing where in the chain each commodity is lost.

The brief above is written and the sources are identified. What remains is the data build. Until it publishes, no figure for this topic appears anywhere on DataSpeaks — we would rather show nothing than show a placeholder.

Where these numbers come from

How we handle gaps

Where a source has not reported for a recent year, the gap is shown as a gap. We do not interpolate to make a series look continuous or a map look complete. Where two agencies publish different figures for the same thing, both appear and we say which is which.

Reuse

Charts from this topic may be reused with credit to DataSpeaks and to the original source named above. The underlying data remains under its own licence — most Government of India datasets permit reuse with attribution, some survey microdata does not.