Union Minister of State for Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Sanjeev Kumar Balyan, Sunday inaugurated the ‘Harit Pradesh Milk Producer Company’ (HPMPC), an entity owned by over 17,000 milk producers of the western Uttar Pradesh. He complimented the farmers in the region’s seven districts for demonstrating the meaning of empowerment and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Balyan, said the Government would support such initiatives as describing HPMPC as a new cooperative in UP. This is not a company, in fact, it is a farmer organisation. There is no place for politics or corruption in it. The focus will be on such entities as they are farmers and work in the interest of farmers.”
Complimenting the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) for facilitating four other such entities in Uttar Pradesh – Varanasi, Amethi and Rae Bareilly and Bundelkhand for upliftment of farmers, the focus is on increasing the productivity of indigenous breeds of milch animals.
He praised milk farmers for procuring and pooling quality milk from hundreds of villages in seven districts namely Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Bulandshahr, Saharanpur, Hapur, Shamli and Bijnor. He said that since technology and transparent digital mechanism was at the core of the new entity, it would ensure better returns for the farmers along with good quality milk for consumers.
This organisation was incorporated on October 26, 2021 with the aim of procuring quality milk from its members and shareholders only. It is an initiative basis the provisions contained in the Companies Act, 2013 enabling the business enterprise to run on the mutual assistance principles similar to the cooperative principles adopted by the International Cooperative Alliance.
You may also like to read: India to host IDF World Dairy Summit in September 2022
Harit Pradesh Milk Producer Company is the 19th such entity across nine states. In the run-up to the formal inauguration, HPMPC has already spread over 1,400 villages across seven districts namely Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Bulandshahr, Saharanpur, Hapur, Shamli and Bijnor, scaling up milk procurement as of now to 150,000 litres per day, indicating the vast size and shape of the business, weaved into a cooperative approach.
National Dairy Development Board’s (NDDB) owned subsidiary NDDB Dairy Services (NDS) provided technical assistance and facilitated the new entity governed by the board of directors elected by the farmer shareholders from amongst themselves and managed by a professional team.
Speaking at the inauguration, Meenesh Shah, Chairman, National Dairy Development Board said, “The NDDB family looks forward every day to make dairy farmers an important source of income and bring a lasting smile on their faces. NDDB and its subsidiaries NDDB Dairy Services and Mother Dairy are helping to give a positive shape to the efforts of the minister. Nineteen farmers-owned such organisations have been formed across the country in the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. These organisations collectively procure about 40 lakh litres of milk per day and so far, these organisations collectively have a turnover of Rs 5,600 crore. It has benefited more than seven lakh families, and 70 per cent are women farmers in these entities.”
Mother Dairy will provide the forward linkage to HPMPC in terms of processing and selling milk to consumers, making the facility available to the farmers throughout the year. This will play an important role in the development of the region.
He said, ”HPMPC will grow impressively in coming five years and NDDB is undertaking some other schemes for dairy development in the region including 120 biogas plants in villages of Muzaffarnagar district, cluster slurry processing units for providing biogas and cooking gas to the farmers.”
Speaking at the occasion, Dr. Saugata Mitra, Managing Director, NDDB Dairy Services (NDS) pointed out that the initiative of MPCs (milk producer companies) also focuses on the empowerment of rural women. NDS came into existence in 2009 for helping milk farmers create their own entities for enhancing milk production and productivity by ensuring an infrastructure for cattle feed and area-specific mineral mixture besides artificial insemination and other developed technologies. Our goal is to bring about a social change in rural India along with substantive contribution for economic upliftment by raising the income levels of each dairy family.”
