Despite difficulties in marketing dairy products due to the lockdown, Tiruchi Milk Producers Union — popularly known as Aavin — has decided against scaling down procurement from milk producers.
According to official statistics, Aavin has marginally surpassed the volume of procurement when compared to the corresponding period of last year.
As on Wednesday, the daily procurement stood at 4,26,000 litres. It was 4,24,000 litres on the same day in 2019. The average milk procurement hovers around 4.2 lakh litres for the last one week. Since many of the private dairies reduced procurement due to restrictions in inter-State and inter-district movement of transport, milk producers, who had so far been supplying to them, diverted it to Aavin.
“We make sure of procuring daily milk collection from the farmers associated with our member societies. It will not be reduced,” said C. Karthikeyan, Chairman, Tiruchi Milk Producers Union, Tiruchi.
As a special step, he said it had been decided to explore the possibilities of procuring milk from other farmers. Steps were taken to draft them under Primary Milk Producers Co-operative Socities.
R. Suman, General Manager, Aavin, Tiruchi, said the supply of milk to various institutions, hostels and hospitals had declined as all of them had closed down. However, sale of milk through agents for domestic consumption had gone up for the last one week. It increased to 1,15,000 litres as against 1,09,000 litres a day. Before the lockdown, milk for domestic consumption was supplied twice a day. It had now been restricted to once a day. The agents were asked to complete sale of milk before 9 a.m.
Besides local sales, two lakh litres of milk was being sent to Chennai daily. About 60,000 litres was sent to Aavin’s milk powder plant in Tiruvannamalai. The remaining quantity was being sent to Erode for its milk powder plant, Mr. Karthikeyan added.
