Fruits are important sources of vitamins and minerals and their role in improving nutritional status needs no emphasis. Fruit production in India, which is the second largest in the world (9 per cent), is growing at a significant growth of 3.74 per cent per annum from 28.63 million tonnes in 1991-92 to 63.50 million tonnes in 2007-08. The per capita availability of fruits even with this increase is lower at 107 g/day than the recommended level of 120 g. One of the main reasons attributed to lower availability is the large quantity of post-harvest losses that occurs at various stages of marketing, which ranged from 15 to 50 per cent (FAO, 1981; Roy, 1989). There have been very few systematic attempts to estimate the losses at each stage of handling and its causal factors. Many studies have been conducted on post-harvest losses of fruits and vegetables based on small-scale experiments but do not reflect the real situations (Ratnam and Nema, 1967; Biswas, 1969; FAO, 1981; Waheed et al., 1986; Government of India, 1985; Madan and Ullasa, 1993). A few studies also estimated losses at each stage of marketing but had not estimated the total value of losses at the macro level which could have provided a scientific basis for valuation (Krishna, 1976; Senthilinathan and Srinivasan, 1994; Srinivas et al., 1997; Gajanana et al., 2002; Sreenivasa Murthy et al., 2004). The post-harvest losses not only reduce the availability of fruits but also result in increase in per unit cost of transport and marketing (Subrahmanyam, 1986). This affects both the producers (reduction in share in consumers’ price) and the consumers (reduced availability and higher prices). At the macro level, rough estimate indicates that India annually loses fruits worth about Rs.13,569 crores (based on 30 per cent loss). The reduction in post-harvest losses is a complementary means for increasing the production, i.e., the cost of preventing losses is less than producing the same