Sabar Dairy: a promising milk cooperative

Abstract

In the winter of 1985, the burgeoning world of Indian dairying was stunned when one of its younger milk cooperatives, for want of processing facilities, said ‘no’ to the milk sent in by its various village units. Sabar Dairy, located in the district of Sabarkantha, in northeastern Gujarat, refused to accept 100,000 litres of milk, for processing and marketing, from its constituting village cooperatives where it had worked so very assiduously to increase milk productivity. All milk cooperatives have known what is called in their lingo a ‘flush’ season, whereby the milk delivery of the animal starts climbing up towards the end of the monsoon, reaches its climax in mid January, and then declines in the summer months, and normally they are prepared for it. But in the case of Sabar, the milk production in the district had proved all the earlier projections of growth wrong.