India is the largest producer of milk in the world with production of 176.35 million tonnes. The vision 2022 document has pegged the country’s estimated milk production at 254.5 million tonnes. Agriculture minister, Radha Mohan Singh said implementation of National Action Plan on Dairy Development 2022, which seeks to increase milk production and double the income of dairy farmers, will require an investment of Rs 51,077 crore.
“The minister operationalized the Rs 10,881-crore Dairy Processing & Infrastructure Development Fund (DIDF) on 13 September by handing over a cheque of Rs 440 crore as the first installment to National Dairy Development Board (NDDB).
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“With this DIDF scheme, 95 lakh farmers in about 50,000 villages will be benefitted,” Singh said. “In addition to this, many skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers will get employment, directly and indirectly.” The minister said DIDF will help create modern infrastructure to augment milk processing capacity. It will help create additional milk processing capacity of 126 lakh litre per day, milk drying capacity of 210 MT per day, and milk chilling capacity of 140 lakh litre per day, he said.
Viable milk unions and dairy federations can get funding through NDDB and National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC). National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) will be disbursing the fund with a corpus of Rs 8,004 crore at 6.5 percent interest, which will be reimbursed over a period of 10 years, to support modernization of the dairy sector. "This initiative is expected to achieve an investment of Rs 10,000 crore in the dairy sector in three years, from 2017-18 to 2019-20," Nabard said. The government has also given a provision of interest subsidy on loans.
The fund would be distributed to six different projects — Dakshina Kannada Milk Union (Udupi), Kolar-Chikhballarpur Milk Union (Kolar), Mysore Milk Union (Mysore), Karnataka Milk Federation (Ramnagar), Karnataka Milk Union (Channarayapatna) and Ropar Milk Union (Ropar), said Nabard.
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Nabard has so far sanctioned Rs 843.81 crore under DIDF for 15 projects with an investment of Rs 1,148.58 crore in Karnataka, Punjab and Haryana. It is expected that sanction will reach Rs 3,800 crore by the end of this fiscal.
Chairman at NABARD Harsh Kumar Bhanwala said 51 percent of agricultural households own milch animals. “Milk production has been growing around 6.5 percent each year and we need to create infrastructure to handle the production and process the same,” he said. He opined that looking at huge investment requirement of dairy sector, there is a case for launching DIDF.
