Students milk a dairy for business lessons

How Anand Agriculture University trains tomorrow’s technocrats.

Anand, the country’s milk capital, also boasts a dairy run for and by students.

This was yet another dream project of Verghese Kurien, the Anand-based creator of India’s milk and dairy revolutions.

Vidya Dairy is a non-profit company, where students of Anand Agricultural University (AAU) are not only taught the technicalities of dairy technology, but also groomed to become the nation’s next-generation dairy technocrats.

Spread over 20 acres, Vidya Dairy started its journey on August 5, 1994. It offers hands-on training to students of dairy technology of AAU for a year. The students spend the third year of their four-year course at the university in the dairy. They not only learn the technicalities of milk processing, but also how to market their products and make a profit.

 

As the principal of the dairy science college, B P Shah puts it: “Kurien felt that our students should learn by doing, learn how to make the dairy business commercially viable and not make a loss”.

Shah, a student of BSc in dairy technology from Seth M C College of Anand, said the need to have hands-on training for dairy science students was felt around the 1980s. Subsequently, a national committee was formed to modify the curriculum.

“The students were very good in theory, but did not know how to solve simple things when they started working. The committee, thus suggested that there should be regional colleges of excellence on the lines of the Indian Institutes of Technology.

The course was modified to add some management-related topics and a BTech degree in dairy science was started,” Shah recollected.

Seth MC College was chosen to have a 100,000-litre per day dairy that would run as an autonomous unit, not by the college, Amul or the dairy development board. A BTech course in dairy technology was started at the college in 1989. MC College later became a constituent college of AAU, after four agricultural universities were identified in Gujarat in 2004.

The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) took the initiative to set up the Vidya Dairy, with a Rs 9.5 crore loan. “The cost of setting up the dairy was around Rs 13.5 crore. The remaining amount was in the form of a grant from the government of India. Last year, we completed repaying the entire loan to NDDB,” Shah said.

Vidya Dairy was registered under the Companies Act in 1998. The dairy science college does not have any specific curriculum. Students not only focus on learning dairy technology but on how to run a dairy, market its products and make a profit. In all, 763 students have graduated since 1994 and all have jobs.

Vidya Dairy is currently run by a batch of 50 students. They get a stipend of Rs 3,000 per month.

Around 80 per cent of the installed capacity is currently utilised, as Vidya processes 70,000 litres of milk daily, besides processing 12,000 litres for ice-cream, cheese, ghee and paneer (cottage cheese).

“The milk is marketed directly by the students, and the rest of the products are marketed by the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation under the Amul brand,” Shah said.

He added that in 1994 the Anand area had a milk market of 52,000 litres per day, but the dairy was given almost double this capacity to face the demand of a growing market.

While the milk market in the area has been growing at four per cent yearly, Vidya has been steadily clocking a 10 per cent growth rate. It is all set to register a turnover of Rs 80 crore in 2009-10, together with a surplus of Rs 1 crore.

“Being a non-profit company, we utilise this surplus for capacity expansion. This fiscal, the amount was spent on augmenting the ice-cream manufacturing set-up and we plan to invest in modernising the equipment,” Shah said.

The dairy has a five-member management committee. The principal, who is also chairman of the company, is one. There is one representative each of NDDB, the managing director of Amul and the managing director of the Kheda District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union. The fifth member is the managing director of the dairy.