This scheme pays institutions, not growers. Every figure on this page comes from the Board's own guideline page, which states each one beside the words "pattern of assistance". Nine of its ten components are funded at 100% and only through a government agency, a public-sector body or the Board itself. Read the figures with that clause attached, because the page prints it and a summary usually does not.
The short answer
If you have seen "NHB gives ₹100 lakh per hectare for nurseries" or "₹50 lakh per machine", you have seen this scheme. The numbers are real. The scheme also says who may receive them, and it is not a private nursery or a farm. A mother-plant nursery under this scheme is to be run by an ICAR institute, a National Research Centre, a State Agricultural University or a public-sector agency. A demonstration machine is imported by a government agency to show farmers, not sold to one. The study tours are for government officers.
Two components reach a grower. Exposure visits take groups of farmers outside their state to training and demonstrations, at 100% of actual cost, with conditions on age and group size. And the machinery component may consider proposals from growers' associations promoted by the Board, cooperative societies and farmer producer organisations, on merit and as the Board's directors decide. Those are the doors. Everything else on the page is the Board describing its own work.
What the ten components fund, and who can hold the money
The page lists the components in one order and describes them in the same order. This table keeps that order and adds the one column the page makes you read for: who the assistance goes through.
| Component | What the page states | Who receives it |
|---|---|---|
| Block, mother-plant and rootstock nursery (above 4 ha) | ₹100.00 lakh per hectare of effective nursery area, 100%, project based | Government agency or public sector only; managed by ICAR, NRCs, SAUs or a public agency |
| Acquisition of technologies, including imported planting material | ₹50.00 lakh per project, 100% | Government agency or PSU only |
| Import of machines and tools for demonstration | ₹50.00 lakh per machine, 100% | Government agency or public sector; growers' associations, cooperatives and FPOs may be considered on merit |
| Development and transfer of technology | Pilot projects, new post-harvest protocols, R&D on specific problems | No cost norm or pattern stated on the page |
| Long-distance transport solution | ₹2,000.00 lakh, project based | Not stated beyond "project based"; the component is about bulk movement by rail |
| Horti-fairs | ₹25.00 lakh per fair, 100% | The Board organises them; selected farmer groups get stall space without rent |
| Exposure visits of farmers outside the state | 100% of actual cost, project based | Groups of farmers, selected by the state or the Board's officer |
| Visits abroad for government officers | ₹6.00 lakh per participant, 100% of travel and course fee | Officers of the Board, the Department and state horticulture departments |
| Seminars, symposia, workshops | ₹10 lakh international, ₹5 lakh national, ₹3 lakh state, ₹0.50 lakh district; less for one- or two-day events | Research institutions, universities, KVKs, state directorates, federations of growers' associations |
| Accreditation and rating of fruit-plant nurseries | ₹1.00 lakh per nursery | Paid by the Board as nodal agency to the accrediting process; a nursery is rated one to five stars |
Two rows deserve a second look. The nursery row is the one most often quoted out of context, and on the page the applicant organisation "will have to bear capital cost on account of land, staff component, water & electricity consumption and annual maintenance" while the Board pays for infrastructure, plant-health systems and planting material of breeder and foundation grade. That is an arrangement between the Board and a public institution. The accreditation row is the one a private nursery does touch: a nursery can seek recognition and a star rating, and the ₹1 lakh is what the Board pays for the assessment, not what the nursery receives.
The exposure visit, in detail
This is the component written for farmers, so its conditions matter. A selected farmer must be between 20 and 55, cultivating horticulture crops on their own land or intending to set up a horticulture farm or industry. Preference goes to small, marginal and women farmers and to people who are already beneficiaries of the NHB, NHM, HMNEH or MIDH schemes — the page names all four. A group may not exceed thirty including any accompanying officers, and one or two officers from the state department or the agricultural university may travel with it. Farmers are selected by the state government or the Board's officer for the state, and the page asks that they be willing to speak about what they saw at district and state workshops afterwards.
What the visit is for is also specified: structured training courses the Board designs with ICAR institutions, universities, KVKs, ATMA societies and named professional institutions; field demonstrations of a technology that "should be new and relevant to the group and must be specifically stated"; exhibitions and fairs; and visits to wholesale markets, auction centres, processing units and storage. You do not apply for this the way you apply for a cold store. You are selected for it, and the route to being selected runs through the state horticulture department.
What the page does not tell you
It carries no date, no reference number and no version. The Board's other scheme material is dated to the day — the August 2026 circular, the January 2025 guideline — and this page is not, so we cannot say which edition it is or when it last changed. The claims behind this guide record that, and it is why none of them carries an applicable-from date. If you are relying on any figure here for a proposal, the Board's Technology Development and Transfer division is the place to confirm it, and the formats for the scheme are published beside the guideline.
It also says nothing about the Board's two schemes that do fund private projects. If what you actually want is a subsidy on a polyhouse, an orchard, a cold store or a pack house, that is Scheme 1 or Scheme 2, which are explained in the NHB section and in the guides on protected cultivation and cold storage. Note that fresh applications under both were suspended on 4 September 2026 pending a reopening date; the notice at the top of the NHB section says whether that still stands.
If you run a nursery
Two things on this page concern you, and neither is the ₹100 lakh. The first is accreditation: the Board rates fruit-plant nurseries from one to five stars on production system, management practices and the quality of planting material, assessed against the ICAR handbook on seed and planting-material testing and the model-nursery standards used under NHM, with periodic surveillance afterwards. A rating is a thing a buyer can check. The second is that the mother-plant nurseries this scheme funds are meant to supply "commercial nurseries for raising mother trees" — the public nursery exists so that yours can buy pedigree material from it. The scheme's value to a private nursery is upstream of it, not paid to it.
