The second phase of the National Dairy Plan (NDP-II), which will focus supporting smaller milk unions to strengthen their marketing efforts and tackling adulteration in milk, is likely to be finalised soon.

NDDB Chairman Meenesh Shah said the World Bank mission would be in Anand during the second week of July to discuss the NDP-II. “Initial clearances are all done,” Shah said, adding that the World Bank’s support in the form of grant/soft loan for NDP-II is likely to be limited to some six to seven states and not the entire country.

“Now, India’s position has changed. The grant which was available earlier is no longer available. It has to be 50:50 with both Government of India and the World Bank contributing equally to the project. In NDP- Phase 1, we got 90 per cent of the soft loan from the World Bank,” Shah said. The size of the NDP-Phase II is likely to be in the range of Rs 1200-1500 crore.

Shah said the project’s second phase would focus on enhancing milk’s testing mechanism digitising milk tankers to control adulteration in transit and manure management besides providing support to smaller milk unions to strengthen marketing, among others. The project may support co-operatives for ethno-veterinary medicine to care of common diseases and also focus on earlier activities like improving village coverage and adding more farmers to the co-operative network.

The NDP-I, with an outlay of ₹2,242 crore was implemented during March 2012 to November 2019 across 18 major dairying states. NDP-I focussed on enhancing the productivity of milch animals and providing market access to milk producers. The implementation of NDP-I has established that a scientifically planned integrated approach toward dairy development can be successful in a large and diverse country like India.

NDP-I, which covered around 59 lakh beneficiaries across 97,000 villages, also contributed to lowering the cost of feeding per kg of milk, iincreasing the net daily income of milk producers. As part of the project, market access was provided to more than 16.8 lakh additionally enrolled milk producers, of which 7.65 lakh are women.

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