Bhubaneswar: To mark the occasion of India’s Milk Man and father of white revolution Dr Veghese Kurien’s birth anniversary, dairy major Milk Mantra celebrated National Milk Day at its Gop Plant. Around 50 high performing Group Associates (GAs) from 13 rural districts of Odisha were gathered in the program and were educated about the grand achievements of Dr. Kurien towards Indian Dairy and how they can take the revolution forward at Milk Mantra.
Group Associates are basically rural dairy farmers who are the ambassadors of Milk Mantra’s unique Ethical Milk Sourcing and who look after the Collection Point (CP) and the group of farmers registered under the particular CP. The GAs were awarded for their dedication and hard work towards dairy development in their respective areas in the entire journey of Milk Manta.
Doctor Kurien’s ‘billion-litre idea’, Operation Flood – was world’s largest dairy development program. His faith on this program and on the farmers of India led India from a milk deficit country to largest producer in the world.
Thanking the GAs for their continuous support towards Milk Mantra, Srikumar Misra, the Founder and CEO of the company said,” The journey of Milk Mantra started in the year 2009 and it took around six years to create a network of 50,000 thousand farmers to associate with the company. But we aim at raising the number of farmers to 1 lakh in the next 3 years by making utmost effort to make our farmers happy in order to bring dairy development in the state.”
Starting with 10 farmers and 25 litres of milk per day to 50,000 farmers with 1.5 lakh litres milk per day, Milk Mantra is on the peak to bring next generation White Revolution in Odisha. The Ethical Milk Sourcing (EMS) program has motivated thousands of farmers to be a part of it among which 5531 are women. At present it has 29 BMCs, 623 collection points for collection of milk from various districts of Odisha like Puri, Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapada, Cuttack, Khurda in the east and Sonepur, Bargarh, Sambalpur and Balangir in the west.
“Group Associates are not only the headman of collection points but are the faces of Milk Mantra. Their performance, dedication and sincerity towards the farmers in the respective village is responsible for bringing dairy development and improvement in the ecosystem of the village.” said Anil Burman, Sourcing Head of the company.
Under Milk Mantra’s formidable supply chain the farmers are ensured fair and timely payment along with extension services. The EMS program has an intangible impact on women empowerment, rural youth reengagement and ancillary employment which positively impacts the standard of living of millions of rural people as well as the ecosystem in Odisha.
As part of its Extension services under EMS program Milk Mantra has conducted as many as 1598 cow loans worth around 15 Crore INR, 752 farmer training camps, 284 veterinary camps, 9651 artificial inseminations. Since inception, creating business opportunity for its GAs it has provided cattle feed of worth around 30 Crore INR in subsidised price to its network farmers through the GAs.
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