Moreover, a professionally-run and well-organised milk development programme has ensured a record high for milk procurement and sale of milk and milk products both within and outside the state. For instance, the sale of milk during the current fiscal has already registered a 20 per cent increase over last year's sales figures.

Similarly, the Pradeshik Cooperative Dairy Federation (PCDF), the nodal body for conducting milkdevelopment programmes in the state, has set a new procurement record by procuring a record 11.36 lakh litres of milk on a single day. The federation has also set an all-time high sales recrod of selling 8.50 lakh litres of milk on a single day recently.

Under the milk development scheme being implemented in UP, the PCDF is represented through 63 milk unions spread over 83 districts in the state which have a collective capacity of cooling and processing almost 21.52 lakh litres of milk daily. Based on the successful three-tier Anand pattern, the milk finally collected by the state's 24 dairies and 39 cooling centres from the milk producer members of the milk unions is later sold to consumers. On an average, the PCDF is procuring around 7.32 lakh litres of milk from over eight lakh milk producers in the state every day at a cost of around Rs 206.33 crore. An additional 50,000 litres of milk were procured daily from around 69,000 milk producers in the Uttarakhand region at the cost of Rs 135 lakh. On thewhole thus the PCDF is selling 7.84 litres of milk to urban consumers on an average every day.

Apart from disbursing milk to consumers in the state, the PCDF has now started supplying milk to Delhi as well through the Delhi Milk Scheme and Mother Dairy outlets. Sources state that the federation supplies around four lakh litres of milk to the Capital daily.

In a bid to provide an even greater thrust to dairy development in the state, the UP government is also planning to revive the intensive mini dairy ``white revolution employment scheme'' under which cattle can be financed on loan to private persons with the facility of buyback of milk.

Not only that, in a bid to remove the lacunae in the existing system of licensing for dairies, sources in the department of dairy development said plans were afoot to bring dairy owners producing 1,000 litres of milk under licensing scheme. Currently, the limit for dairy owners is those producing 10,000 litres of milk. Furthermore, with a view to providing jobs to theunemployed, the dairy development department has decided to provide milk on a commission of 50 paise per litre.

UP is also planning to bring in hi-tech equipment into the milk sector. Bulk vending machines similar to those of Mother Dairy will soon be installed for consumers. Initially, the machines would be installed in the cities of Lucknow and Kanpur and later in other cities of the state as well. In addition, arrangements are being made for setting up ice-cream units in Lucknow and Noida and a powdered milk and cattle feeding unit in Kanpur. Talks in this regard have already been initiated with the National Dairy Development Board sources disclosed.