The Hindu Business Line : Major part of the milk you drink is ‘reconstituted’

New Delhi, Aug. 14 India may pride itself on being the globe’s No. 1 milk producer. However, this achievement is tempered by the fact that even today a significant part of the milk you and I drink is not ‘pure’, but reconstituted from powder and white butter.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the national Capital itself, where the market leader, Mother Dairy India Ltd, consumes an estimated 20,000 tonnes of skimmed milk powder (SMP) annually or 55 tonnes daily. That translates into six lakh litres per day (LLPD) of milk or roughly 30 per cent of the 20-22 LLPD that Mother Dairy sells on an average in Delhi. The proportion of reconstituted milk to total throughout rises to 50 per cent or so during summer months.

Now, there is nothing wrong per se about reconstituted milk. Every dairyman will tell you that in summers, milk output falls to nearly half the levels of the ‘flush’ winter months. The surplus milk procured during ‘ ;flush’ is converted into powder, which is reconstituted to cover the liquid milk shortfall in the ‘lean’ season.

The recombination route is also unavoidable when it comes to meeting the liquid milk demand in traditionally deficit regions such as the North-East or even West Bengal. The Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) claims that it supplies ‘pure’ milk in the whole of Gujarat, Mumbai, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh.

“But for the Kolkata market, we have to use some powder. Though we do transport liquid milk by rail tankers from Anand, it cannot be done beyond a point,” admits Mr R.S. Sodhi, Chief General Manager, GCMMF.

Balancing purposes

In the South and West, the bulk of milk marketed by cooperatives and private dairies is ‘pure’. While there is requirement for powder, it is more for ‘balancing purposes’. The Prevention of Food Adulteration (PFA) rules stipulate a minimum 8.5 per cent solids-not-fat (SNF) content for toned milk and 9 per cent in double-toned.

“Cow milk occasionally contains less SNF. To meet the PFA standards, one then adds SMP for balancing purposes,” notes Mr R.G. Chandramogan, Managing Director of the Chennai-based Hatsun Agro Product Ltd.

But this is different from selling wholly reconstituted milk on a large scale as is being done in Delhi. Unlike the North-East, Delhi is surrounded by Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan, which are the country’s top three milk producers, besides Haryana.

“When you are in the middle of a surplus milk belt, there is no logic for such high reliance on powder,” says Dr R.S. Khanna, an independent dairy consultant.

According to him, if dairies were marketing reconstituted milk, they should be asked to label their product so.

“Countries such as China and Hong Kong have introduced mandatory labelling to distinguish reconstituted milk from normal milk. If this is done here, the consumers would themselves demand fresh milk from dairies,” he adds.

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