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Govt strengthening dairy infra to produce quality milk through schemes
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Thursday, 07 February, 2019, 14 : 00 PM [IST]
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Our Bureau, New Delhi
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The government is making efforts to strengthen infrastructure for production of quality milk, procurement, processing and marketing of milk and milk products through various dairy development schemes, namely the National Programme for Dairy Development (NPDD), the National Dairy Plan Phase-I (NDP-I) and the Dairy Entrepreneurship Development Scheme (DEDS).
This was stated by Radha Mohan Singh, minister of agriculture and farmer’s welfare, during his address, titled Milk Processing Infrastructure in Dairy Cooperative Sector, at the ministry’s Inter-session Meeting of Consultative Committee, held here on Thursday.
“Further, the Dairy Processing and Infrastructure Development Fund (DIDF) has been set up with a corpus of Rs 8,004 crore for the setting up of chilling infrastructure and installation of electronic milk adulteration testing equipment at village level and creation/modernisation/expansion of processing infrastructure and manufacturing facilities for value-added products,” Singh said.
He added that the government was committed to doubling farmers’ incomes by 2022 by providing greater access to rural milk producers by strengthening dairy infrastructure in order to help generate year-round income and gainful employment.
The minister said that 22 sub-projects were approved in January 2019, at a total estimated project cost of Rs 3,147.22 crore, in five states, namely Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra. He added that new schemes with soft loans from World Bank and Japan International Corporation Agency (JICA) were being finalised to extend the benefits to a wider number of farmers.
Singh stated that the government was also formulating plans for the creation of dairy infrastructure, besides implementing the ongoing schemes for dairy development.
“The National Action Plan (NAP) for Dairy Development envisages increasing milk production to 254.5 million MT (metric tonne) by 2021-22 requiring an annual growth rate of 8.56 per cent, which would lead to increase in per capita availability of milk to 515g per day by 2021-22, addressing the nutritional requirement of the growing population,” he added.
Singh said that to do this, it has been targeted to increase the organised milk handling from present 21 per cent to 41 per cent by March 2022, while increasing the cooperative share from the present 10 per cent to 20 per cent.
He disclosed that as a result of prudent policy intervention, India ranked first among the world’s milk producing nations, achieving an annual production of 176.35 million tonne during 2017-18 with an annual growth rate of 6.62 per cent.
The per capita availability of milk has reached a level of 375g per day during 2017-18, which is more than the world average of around 294.2g per day. Growth in milk production is 23.8 per cent during 2014-18 as compared to 2010-14.
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