Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Multi-pronged strategy on dairy front

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Animal Husbandry Department and its associate agencies have launched a multi-pronged strategy to augment milk production in the State. Food and Civil Supplies Minister C. Divakaran, who is also in charge of Animal Husbandry, told The Hindu on Saturday that the plan is to increase milk production by 70 per cent during the Eleventh Five Year Plan and achieve self-sufficiency by end of the subsequent Plan period.

Selective cross-breeding, elimination of low-yielding breeds, induction of high-yielding breeds, focussed disease preventive and control programmes, augmenting feed availability, ensuring better income to dairy farmers and providing insurance coverage to animals are some of the components of the strategy. The average milk yield of cattle in the State is 7.1 litres per day and through various programmes the Animal Husbandry Department is targeting to increase it to 10 litres.

Animal Husbandry Department Director R. Vijayakumar told The Hindu that according to the norms set by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the per capita milk requirement is about 240 gm a day. Based on this, it can be assumed that the State’s milk demand is 80 lakh litres a day. But the domestic production is only 60 lakh litres a day. This means that the State’s milk import requirement is about 20 lakh litres a day.

Dr. Vijayakumar said that under the Ksheeradhara scheme for augmenting the productivity of cattle, farmers are given subsidy for artificial insemination for selective cross-breeding with high-yielding breeds such as Holstein Friesian of the U.S. and Jersey of the U.K. The semen for this is imported from the cattle farms approved by the Government of India.

Kerala Livestock Development Board Managing Director Ani S. Das said steps are on for the import of 20 exotic bulls, 200 embryos and 2,000 doses of semen. This is a Central government scheme and the import is done by the Central Frozen Semen Production and Training Institute, Bangalore. About 4,500 high-yielding cattle procured from other States have been distributed to farmers across the State under the Pasugram cattle induction scheme.

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