India is an agricultural country and animal husbandry is an integral part of it. Many rural families depend on animal husbandry and milk production for their livelihood. Amul Dairy, laid the foundation of the White Revolution, which made the country self-sufficient in milk production and has maintained the number one position in the world milk production for the past several years.
Artificial insemination is a proven scientific method for improving genetics of animals. The company has decided to digitise the artificial insemination service in its operational area. It was initiated on an experimental basis in the year 2019 in 25 village milk producer societies and was monitored and studied for one year.
After getting appreciable functional and operational results, all the 1,200 village level milk producer societies of the company’s milkshed area have been covered under digitalisation.
On registration at the Amul call centre for AI, an automatic message is sent to the milk producer as well as the artificial insemination technician of the milk society through mobile.
The artificial insemination technician immediately reaches the milk producer's house and performs the artificial insemination and updates all the information on the mobile immediately, the message of artificial insemination completion is received at the company’s call-centre and milk producer.
Pregnancy diagnosis is done after two and a half months for which artificial insemination is notified through SMS. If the animal is found pregnant, the information is updated in the mobile application system. After nine months, calving related information like sex of calf is registered in the mobile application along with its date of birth.
With this information, deworming and vaccination can be planned by Amul Dairy. There is no need to keep physical record by milk producer as all the information is stored by the dairy through software system.
Digitisation of artificial insemination provides instant service to the milk producers as well as information of milch cattle is also stored in the mobile software system and can be analysed.
The artificial insemination technicians do not have to write or save any kind of register and every information has to be filled in the mobile application system on the spot. This helps to save a lot of time and they can perform better.
Amit Vyas, managing director, Amul Dairy, Anand, said, “A very good response to this method has been received from the members of all village milk producer societies in the Amul Dairy milkshed area. Digitisation of AI services will help to get the data of pregnancy months, calving prediction and milk production accordingly. This will help to plan milk processing at plant level.”
“At present, registration of more than 4,500 artificial insemination calls done by Amul call centre daily. Still Amul Dairy is trying to make this method more effective and efficient. Amul Dairy performs more than 1 million artificial insemination annually in milkshed area. Through digitalisation, transparent information as well as its analysis can be used to make accurate decisions and make the animal husbandry business flourish,” he added.