It has become a problem of plenty for Lakshman Jadhav. The 30-year-old is a dairy farmer from Kandhar village in Nanded district of Maharashtra. His dairy, with 130 buffaloes, produces up to 650 litres of milk per day. But with the state under a lockdown, Jadhav does not know what to do with all that milk, and he is staring at losses.
“Usually, I send most of the milk to Nanded [district headquarter]. Some of it gets sold in the village itself. But, with the locking down of restaurants and hotels, the demand for milk has plummeted,” Jadhav told Gaon Connection. He said he did not know what to do with all that extra milk on his hands.
Maharashtra has been one of the worst affected states in the country with a relentless spike in COVID-19 cases. The state has imposed a lockdown till mid May to contain the spread of the coronavirus. And while shops selling milk and dairy products are allowed to remain open between 7 am to 11 am, it is not enough for the farmers to tide over the crisis.
“Last year, too, was difficult. I took the milk door-to-door to sell it,” Jadhav recalled. “I now make ghee [clarified butter] and paneer [Indian cottage cheese] that I send to Pune. I have to find ways to augment my income as I have to feed my buffaloes too,” he added.
The story is no different about 1,800 kilometres up north, in a village in Punjab. Dairy farmer Mahendra Singh owns 20 cows and he gets 80 litres of milk a day from them. “We do not have much land and the dairy is our main source of income,” said the 45-year-old who lives in Santokh Singh village in Fazilka district of the state. “The lockdown has caused us untold problems,” he told Gaon Connection.
As the second wave of COVID 19 sweeps across the country, lockdowns, both complete and partial, have staged a comeback. Sweet shops, restaurants and other eateries that consumed considerable amounts of milk have downed their shutters. This has left dairy farmers high and dry.
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According to Singh, the income from sale of milk used to be about Rs 70,000 to Rs 80,000 a month. But that has now almost halved to Rs 35,000 to Rs 40,000 a month. “I have been in this business for five years, and never have I faced the kind of loss I have incurred in the past one year,” Singh said dejectedly.
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With the sale of milk declining, it has meant the dairy farmers have had to compromise on the cattle feed. Singh’s each cow needed six kilos of cattle feed a day. “The feed costs approximately twenty five rupees a kilo. We do not have that kind of money to buy so much feed,” he said.
Distressed dairy farmers
Of the country’s total milk production, 75 per cent comes from marginal and landless farmers. There are approximately 100 million dairy farmers, and according to the 20th Livestock Census the country has over 125 million buffaloes and cows.
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Last summer, during the lockdown, Gaon Connection conducted a nationwide survey of over 25,371 rural respondents on the impact of the COVID 19 on rural India (Read the full report here). The survey included dairy farmers as well.
Fifty six per cent of those associated with dairy farming had said that getting the milk to the markets posed a big challenge; 53 per cent respondents said they found it difficult to find customers.
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For the dairy farmers and dairy owners, it is back to square one.
Gaurav Yadav in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, owns a dairy that sells milk and milk-based products. Dairy farmers from villages nearby sell him the milk. “We buy the milk only once a day from them, while earlier we used to buy milk twice a day. But, now we have no use for so much milk,” Yadav told Gaon Connection. Expressing his sympathy with the dairy farmers, he said that they were being forced to sell the milk at a loss.
“We have a lockdown till the middle of May. We are allowed to open shop for three hours every day,” Yadav said. But, three hours were too little and he could hardly sell anything in that window, he said. There were hostels nearby that would buy a lot of milk, but those are closed and now only the people in nearby localities buy milk from him, he added.
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In the past one year, many dairy farmers have shut down business as they could not recover the losses after the first lockdown.
“Whether it is a farmer or a dairyist, everyone is struggling with losses,” Rajendra Varma, a dairy owner, told Gaon Connection. He owned more than 17 cows at Maksumganj, about 15 kilometres away from Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh. He had a model farm that people came to visit from near and afar, but he was forced to sell most of his prized cows.
“If there is no sale of milk, how will we feed the cattle? That is why I sold them off one by one,” he said. Varma is now left with just four cows for his domestic needs.
