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PUNE, Aug. 2

THE National Dairy Development Board has set up a joint venture company to ``significantly intervene'' to help milk co-operatives to market their products aggressively.

The new company, christened Mother Dairy Fruits and Vegetables Company, had been set up a couple of months ago and was working out the modalities of the project to help co-operatives hone up their marketing skills, said the NDDB Chairperson, Ms Amrita Patel, on Thursday.

She was in Pune to deliver a talk on `New millennium, new women' at a function organised by the Lila Poonawala Foundation.

``Outside Gujarat, few cooperatives have the marketing skills to match the competition from MNCs'', Ms Patel said adding that societies in Haryana, UP, AP and Tamil Nadu had approached the board seeking its help in marketing their produce.

Ms Patel also said the prime challenge before co-operative societies currently was to capture the liquid milk market which, she said, could only be done by keeping costs down to make the product more affordable to the consumer and by aggressively upgrading technology and quality standards to meet the WTO milk regulations.

She said the board was currently setting up a Rs 3.5-crore dairy in the Kareemnagar district of Andhra Pradesh funded entirely from the savings of a self-help group of women from Mulkanoor. The 25,000 litres per day dairy will be the first in the country to have an all-women board that would manage the business on its own, albeit with the help of professional managers. The dairy was expected to be operational early next year.

``The dairy is being set up by a small self-help group that had its root in a group of educated women in Mulkanoor forming small savings groups for women. The group has saved over Rs 6 crore today and is using part of this money to set up the dairy which they want to run their way,'' she said.

NDDB was planning to increase women membership from the present level of 21 per cent to at least 50 per cent by 2010, Ms Patel said. She stressed the need for self-help groups to use their money to start profitable ventures.

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