Milk Mantra along with LabourNet, an NSDC (National Skill Development Corporation) partner has recently organised a three day Prior Learning Program under Prime Minister Kaushal Vikash Yojana (PMKVY) for its network farmers. This was organised at Tinitiara village of Gop area where at least 400 farmers were educated on healthy dairy farming practises for enhanced productivity and profitability.
The program was highly informative in terms of clearing out myths and brings out realities into the conventional practices. “Though dairying has been our family occupation and each member of my family has experience of it, this program has been an eye opener for me as I came to know some practices which are conventionally followed and are wrong. For example, I came to know that cow should not be fed before milking, said Saudamini Mati, a dairy farmer of Milk Mantra’s Ethical Milk Sourcing (EMS) network.”
Sitikanta Samantray, trainer of LabourNet said, “We are overwhelmed with this enthusiastic participation of the farmers of Milk Mantra and they have been trained on dairy farming, dairy entrepreneurship and how to make dairy farming a main stream profession”. Certificate to all participant farmers and token cash prizes to selective few were distributed based on verbal assessment session at the closing ceremony of the program.
Speaking on the occasion, Srikumar Misra, MD & CEO, Milk Mantra stated, “We have been conducting such programmes to build the rural ecosystem with our network farmers as part of our EMS extension services since the beginning of Milk Mantra 5 years ago, and it is encouraging to see the govt has also started seeing the importance of training the dairy farmers and helping them sustain a better livelihood. We believe that this association with PMKVY will add value to our efforts and will continue to develop skill of our farmers. We have plans to train as much as 14000 network farmers in one year time”.
This partnership was facilitated by OUAT in their objective to involve private companies who work for sustainable eco development of rural communities. Milk Mantra’s unique EMS program ensure that farmers not only get paid fairly on time but also have adequate access to its extension services aimed at bringing in clean and high quality milk production. It should be noted; Milk Mantra through its EMS model has already conducted 423 farmers training, 6700 Artificial Inseminations, 160 vet-camps, 1260 vaccination and has facilitated 1300 farmer loans. Empowered by EMS model, Milk Mantra has got a rapidly growing farmer network that currently has 45000 rural farmers across 10 districts (Puri, Jagatsinghpur, Cuttack, Khurda, Kendrapada, Bargarh, Sonepur, Bolangir, Sambalpur & Jharsuguda) of Odisha and 2025 villages.