Banglar Dairy: State to offer enhanced procurement rate of Rs 34/ltr from Rs 31/ltr

kolkata: In encouragement to farmers associated with milk production across the state, the Mamata Banerjee government will offer an enhanced procurement rate of Rs 34 per litre, up from Rs 31 from 2022- 23 fiscal.

The increased rate is an outcome of the state's decision to raise the incentive from Rs 4 to Rs 7. More than 70,000 milk farmers across the state will be benefitted.

"The consumer's price of milk & milk products of all other brands have increased, except state government's milk & milk products under the Banglar Dairy brand. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee instructed the Animal Resources Development (ARD) department not to increase the consumer's price of milk, to avoid this price hike burden on common people, especially after the Covid pandemic," a senior official of the ARD department said. A 500 ml milk packet of Banglar Diary is priced in the range of Rs 20 to 27 for common people under five trade names viz. Swasthyasathi, Aayush, Pransudha, Supreme and Sanjibani. Furthermore, a loose variety of milk is also made available from 125 outlets in Kolkata and its suburbs like Howrah, Hooghly, North & South 24-Parganas, and is sold at an MRP of Rs 17 per half-litre.

The system of disbursement of the procurement price has been simplified to reduce the period of credit to the milk farmers' accounts. Previously, the payment of procurement price often took nearly 2 months, which is now being credited within 10 to 15 days.

"Before the formation of Banglar Dairy, the milk of rural Bengal was sold through the state government's project Mother Dairy Calcutta. However, there were lots of limitations while operating the supply chain under Mother Dairy Calcutta, being a project. There were limitations like no permission to sell milk and its products outside West Bengal or in e-commerce platforms; no permission to use the Mother dairy Calcutta brand in the products," the official added. Now, with the formation of Banglar Dairy, which happens to be the first government-owned Dairy company in North-East India, all the limitations mentioned above have been resolved and the avenue of e-commerce has also opened up. Banglar Dairy also opened the opportunity for all dairy processing plants to start processing products under the Banglar Dairy brand and make them available to the people, maintaining the prescribed quality standards.