India grows and produces far more perishable food than its cold storage network can currently hold, and that mismatch is the starting point for almost every discussion of the country's cold chain. Fruit, vegetables and dairy output is large by any measure, but a significant share of cold storage capacity that does exist is concentrated in a single category, potatoes, and a small number of states, leaving large agricultural regions with far less capacity than their output would call for.
At the same time, India runs one of the largest vaccine cold chains in the world and a fast-growing pharmaceutical export sector, so the same country holds both an underbuilt food cold chain and a highly developed pharmaceutical one, side by side rather than at a similar level of maturity.
Large agricultural output with limited cold storage
A large share of harvested fruit and vegetables is lost between farm and market, spoiling before it ever reaches a buyer, and most of that loss traces back to a lack of storage near the farm rather than a failure later in distribution. Existing cold storage is weighted heavily toward single-commodity stores, built for one crop's specific temperature and humidity needs, which leaves other categories like leafy vegetables and soft fruit with far fewer suitable facilities even in regions that grow them at scale. Building multi-commodity storage sited near production, not just near cities, is the standing gap the sector has been working to close.
Dairy is the exception that shows what a well-built cold chain can do at this scale: a cooperative model collecting milk from millions of small producers and chilling it within hours of milking, at village-level collection points, has made dairy one of the more reliably cold-chained categories in the country. That same collection-point model, small, distributed, close to the producer, has been proposed for fruit and vegetables but has not been built out nearly as far, which is part of why the two categories perform so differently against loss.
Power reliability
Grid power in many agricultural and semi-urban areas is not continuous, and a cold store that loses power for several hours during a peak summer day can lose the temperature control it exists to provide, which makes backup generation a practical requirement rather than an optional upgrade for most facilities. That reliance on backup power adds a running cost that a facility in a market with stable grid supply does not carry, and it is one reason building and operating cold storage in rural India costs more relative to the value of the product stored than the same facility would in a market with reliable mains power.
Solar-powered cooling and hybrid systems that switch between grid and battery power without a gap have become a common answer at smaller sites, for the same reason they have in other power-constrained regions: a facility that cannot depend on continuous grid supply either builds its own generation or accepts a temperature risk every time the power drops. Larger cold storage operators generally run diesel backup as well, sized to carry the full refrigeration load rather than just lighting and controls, because a partial backup that keeps the lights on but not the compressors defeats the purpose of having backup at all.
Vaccine programme scale
India's national immunisation programme moves vaccine doses through a cold chain spanning national and state stores down to primary health centres and outreach sessions in villages, at a scale, measured in the number of storage points and health workers involved, among the largest anywhere. Running that scale reliably has meant heavy investment in temperature monitoring, structured equipment inventories and trained cold chain handlers at every level, an approach to cold chain in emerging markets that has been studied and adapted well beyond the vaccine programme itself, including by the food cold chain trying to close its own gaps.
Growing pharma manufacturing exports
India manufactures a large share of the world's generic medicines and a growing volume of vaccines and biologics for export, and that manufacturing base depends on a cold chain capable of moving product from factory to airport to a buyer overseas without a break in temperature control. Air cargo cold chain capacity out of the country's main pharma manufacturing hubs has expanded specifically to serve that export volume, because a manufacturing sector this size cannot rely on capacity built for general cargo. Pharmaceutical manufacturers, contract logistics providers and national health authorities are the principal operators here, and the standards this export trade runs to are generally well ahead of what the domestic food cold chain currently operates under.