Union Minister Amit Shah on Thursday rolled out ‘White Revolution 2.0’, a comprehensive initiative aimed at empowering women and creating job opportunities in rural areas as well as reducing malnourishment with increased off-take of milk.
Under the initiative, the government aims to increase milk procurement by dairy cooperative societies by 50 per cent over the next five years.
“No government can do what mothers are capable of doing for their child,” Shah said, highlighting how children are fed milk when they have cows or buffaloes at home while those families with limited income do not prefer to spend on milk if they do not possess any cow.
Focus on 4 key areas
The White Revolution 2.0 will focus on four key areas – empowering women farmers, enhancing local milk production, strengthening dairy infrastructure and boosting dairy exports, he said, adding, it is one of the three initiatives undertaken in the first 100 days of the Modi government’s third term.
“Maximum women are engaged in the dairy sector. This new initiative will focus on empowering women and further strengthening the fight against malnutrition,” Shah said while addressing a national convention of cooperatives.
The minister also launched the RuPay Kisan Credit Cards for dairy farmers and the installation of micro-ATMs at dairy cooperative societies.
Additionally, he released standard operating procedures for the computerisation of 67,930 primary agriculture credit societies (PACS).
The Centre has made an elaborate plan to either set up or strengthen 1,00,000 new and existing district cooperative societies, multi-purpose district cooperative societies and multi-purpose PACS, with necessary infrastructure so that they are able to procure milk directly from farmers.
Initially, the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) has been asked to fund the initiative by providing ₹40,000 each to 1,000 M-PACS.
Full budget support
Shah assured full budgetary support for the programme and said: “Many have apprehensions about whether White Revolution 2.0 will get sufficient budgetary support. I assure full budget support for this as it is a top priority sector for the government.”
The minister also announced the nationwide expansion of the ‘Cooperation among Cooperatives’ initiative, which was successfully piloted in Gujarat.
The programme will provide interest-free cash credit to dairy farmers through RuPay-Kisan Credit Cards and distribute micro-ATMs to dairy cooperative societies, bringing banking services to farmers’ doorsteps.
“While there were reforms in different sectors in the country in the past 70 years, timely reforms were not undertaken in the cooperative sector. The purpose behind establishing a separate cooperation ministry was to revive and modernise the cooperative sector and create job opportunities,” he said.
