The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) has recently received Rs 440 Cr from the Dairy Processing and Infrastructure Development Fund (DIDF), marking the formal launch of the fund set up to provide soft loans to modernise and raise capacity of dairy cooperatives.
National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has set up the DIDF with a corpus of Rs 8,004 crore to bring more dairy farmers into organised milk marketing through cooperatives.
NABARD has so far sanctioned Rs 843.81 crore under the DIDF for 15 projects with an outlay of Rs 1,148.61 crore for dairy cooperatives in Karnataka, Punjab and Haryana.
The DIDF is aimed creating at additional milk processing capacity of 126 lakh litre per day, milk drying capacity of 210 million tonne (MT) per day and milk chilling capacity of 140 lakh litre per day.