To ease the cash crunch faced by milk producers in Gujarat, the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) will disburse payments to members through direct credit into their bank accounts.
“Currently, 60 per cent of milk producers have bank accounts, but due to some vested interests, the payment was made in cash. We are in the process of opening bank accounts for those milk producers who do not have bank accounts,” said Jethabhai Patel, Chairman, GCMMF.
“We have been stressing on the need to go for cashless transactions for the last couple of years. We have asked all our dairy unions to help farmers open their bank accounts in the next couple of months,” he added.
The co-operative and its 18 associated milk unions are paying around ₹450 crore on a weekly basis to 36 lakh milk producers through 18,500 milk co-operatives in Gujarat.
Patel said milk procurement and sale has not been affected by demonetisation.