Shakti Ranjan Panigrahy
Assistant Professor
International Agribusiness Management Institute
Anand Agricultural University, ANAND – 388 110, Gujarat
Abstract
Milk is a liquid and a perishable commodity and its demand is increasing day by day as it is the cheapest source of protein and almost 70% of marketed surplus of milk is handled by the informal sector in India. To discuss the milk trading practices of the itinerant traders was the basic objective of this study. Karnal district of Haryana was purposively selected as it was the hub of numbers of ICAR institutes and fifty respondents were selected on the basis of snowball sampling particularly in the morning time. An in-depth inquiry from the selected respondents was made about their milk collection practices in which overall marketed surplus of milk, its price details, fate of the left over milk, pooled milk composition etc were the main frame of the schedules along with some of the socioeconomic status of the respondents. When the collected data were analyzed, the datarevealed that 90% of marketed milk came directly from producer in the ratio of 3:2 as from cow milk and buffalo milk respectively and milk was sold as Rs32/- for lower quality and Rs 42/- as high quality and quality of milk was also verified on the basis of butter fat percentage from nearby dairy industries and it was found that lower quality milk was at par with cow milk and high quality milk was at par with buffalo milk.Almost 24% of milk left in a day without marketed and almost 86% of left over milk were gone to the dairy industries. Besides that they were also selling the pooled milk as for demand at the price of Rs38/- in the milk composition of 65% of cow milk and 35% of buffalo milk out of total milk. At the end it is concluded that itinerant traders carry both cow milk and buffalo milk at a time and sold them in different price and quality to the consumer and dairy industries were accepting the left over milk at the end of the day.
Key Words: Itinerant traders, Milk marketing, Marketed surplus, Pooled milk composition, Butterfat percentage
