BARC bid to make onion disease-free

NASHIK, June 9: The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) will set up an onion irradiation centre at Lasalgaon which will extend the shelf-life of the tuber and make the crop disease-free.

Project director of BARC’s Food Irradiation section Dr D R Bongirwar said that the Rs 8-crore project would be completed in two years. The irradiation process could however, raise the price of onions by 25 paise per kg.

The centre would have a capacity to process 10,000 tonnes of onions per hour and the treatment would consume about 6,000 hours per year. Irradiated onions would be immune to pests and diseases and their rate of decay would slow down drastically.