With unexplored dairy-potential areas as target, NDP-II is set for rollout from April 2023

The second phase of ambitious dairy development project – National Dairy Plan (NDP-II) with the World Bank support is set to kick-off from April next year with a targeted focus on the unexplored dairy-potential areas in the country.

This comes about three years after the first phase NDP-I was ended with the financial closure in March 2020.

“The NDP-II is on course. The outlay for the second phase of the dairy plan will remain the same. It will be focused on forming dairy cooperatives (in new areas), and enabling testing equipment etc,” Meenesh Shah, Chairman, National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) told Businessline on the sidelines of the recently-concluded International Dairy Federation (IDF) World Dairy Summit 2022 at Greater Noida.

“There have been no issues from the World Bank. The NDP-II will rollout from April next,” said Shah clearing the air on the prolonged delay in the second phase.

The World Bank’s support will be a grant and the plan’s coverage area will be restricted to a select few States, unlike the NDP-I which had 18 Indian states under its coverage.

The Government of India is said to be looking at covering only those states where dairy the dairying potential is still untapped or less explored. This means the dairy rich states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Punjab are likely to be knocked off, and the states likely to be considered include Eastern states of Odisha, Jharkhand and parts of North-East.

The NDP-II would keep the funding for processing infrastructure out of its purview, as it is already supported through Central schemes of dairy infrastructure development. Also, in contrast to the earlier discussions, the private sector may not get any direct benefit from the NDP-II.

NDP-I performance

NDDB is the implementing agency for the NDP that was first started in 2012 with World Bank support to increase the productivity of milch animals and improve market access of milk producers in project areas. The phase-I outlay was ₹2,242 crore, while the second phase is expected to be about ₹1,500 crore.

The stakeholders believe that the NDP-I’s implementation has yielded desired results with a scientifically-planned integrated approach towards dairy development. The World Bank too had ranked the outcome of NDP-I as ‘highly satisfactory’. During the implementation of the plan, milk production per animal increased from the baseline 0.0 in February 2012 to 21 per cent in November 2019, against the target of 10 per cent, thereby exceeding the target by 210 per cent. The average daily milk output per animal increased from 5.03 liters per day to 6.09 liters.

On the market access, NDP-I outcome showed 75 per cent of the milk getting sold to the organised sector (including cooperatives, producer companies or directly to private sector) as against 45 per cent, earlier.

Shah also stated that the productivity enhancement programmes continued parallelly irrespective of the NDP but with the Central support under the Rashtriya Gokul Mission (RGM).