Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann on Wednesday announced to expand the reach of Milkfed by increasing the milk supply to Delhi from present 30,000 litres to 2 lakh litres.
“This is a revolutionary step aimed at supplementing the income of the farmers to bail them out of the agrarian crisis,” he said after inaugurating the new Verka milk processing and butter plant here.
The state-of-the-art plant has been constructed at a cost of Rs 105 crore with milk processing capacity of 9 lakh litres daily and 10 metric tonnes of daily butter handling capacity.
He said the state government had inked an agreement with the Delhi Government in this regard. Under the pact, Verka will open new outlets at every nook and corner of Delhi to supply milk and milk products in the national capital.
Mann said the sole aim of his government was to extend maximum support and best prices to the dairy farmers of Punjab by following the true essence of cooperation.
He asserted that farmer-friendly schemes should be implemented so as to boost the dairy business among the youth for making them financially independent and self-reliant.
He directed Milkfed to launch an aggressive marketing campaign to capture a sizable chunk of the consumer market not only in the state but across the country and even abroad. He said the leading cooperative had a perceptible presence in the domestic market as Verka was a household name in the region.
Meanwhile, the CM exhorted the farmers to refrain from burning paddy straw. He said the country’s largest bio-energy plant built over 20 acres in Sangrur would wipe out the menace of paddy straw burning.
Reiterating his commitment to provide corruption-free administration in the state, he said even if the corrupt leaders had joined some affluent political party, his government had ensured that they were put behind the bars.
