Department of Animal Husbandry & Dairying has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Ministry of Food Processing Industries on Wednesday for extending the benefits of various schemes to the beneficiaries by providing them credit support in establishing dairy processing, meat processing and animal feed plant.

Dovetailing and synergizing efforts of both the departments especially in the context of the common objective of helping the farmers and double their income through the livestock sector is the need of the hour, said Union Fisheries, Animal Husbandry & Dairying Minister, Parshottam Rupala.

Both the departments pledged to work together to achieve the goal for income generation and for sustainable development of the rural poor.

Ministry Of Food Processing Industries has been implementing schemes such as One District One Product (ODOP), while theDepartment of Animal Husbandry & Dairying runs the credit link grant assistance scheme to dairy, fisheries, poultry and animal feed units.

Now, new units for ODOP products will be supported for capital investment. Similarly, the units in the dairy and poultry sector will be recommended by the Department of Animal Husbandry to avail benefits under the Prime Minister Kisan Sampada Yojana, which is meant to augment the supply chain management from farm gate to retail outlet.

Quality testing infra

“There is a shortage of milk quality testing infrastructure and village level cold chain infrastructure, which is adversely affecting the export, though the possibilities are there,” the government said in a statement.

The country’s dairy products have 0.1 per cent share in world trade of these items, even though India has emerged as one of the top 10 exporters of farm products.

The livestock sector is an important sub-sector of agriculture in the Indian economy which grew at 8.2 per cent CAGR between 2014-15 and 2018-19. Even as India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of milk and milk products, only 40 per cent of the dairy sector is organised.

Milk production in the country increased to 198.4 million tonnes in 2019-20 from 146.3 million tonnes in 2014-15 with an annual growth rate of 6.28 per cent. Per capita availability of milk has also increased from 307 gm in 2013-14 to 406 gm in 2019-20.

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