Milk sales in the State capital have gone up in the summer months, but adequate arrangements are in place to stave off a shortage, officials of the Thiruvananthapuram regional union of Milma have said.
With the demand increasing, the dairy cooperative is balancing the supply with consignments from the milk-surplus Malabar region and States such as Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
Sales in the capital city and suburbs have risen from approximately 2.06 lakh litres in the pre-summer months to 2.20 lakh litres during March and April. Milk procurement in the district has experienced a dip due to the shortage of green fodder during the summer.
Milk procurement from farmers in the district stands at 1.55 lakh litres at present. The rest is being met through milk ‘imports’ from outside the district.
“The demand for milk has risen during the summer months. At the same time, we are not facing a shortage. We are meeting the demand-supply gap with consignments from the Malabar region that has surplus milk and also Tamil Nadu and Karnataka that too has a surplus at the moment,” an official of the Thiruvananthapuram Regional Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union (TRCMPU), one of three Milma regional unions, said.
Three types
TRCMPU currently sells three milk types—the yellow sachet double toned milk (1.5% fat), the blue sachet toned milk (3% fat), and the new green sachet (4.5%) milk introduced last year. The sale of the latter stands at around 15,000 litres per day. Statewide, Milma had recently enhanced the subsidy on its cattle feed by ₹30 to ₹100 per bag.
