World Milk Day special
June 1, 2021: World Milk Day  is organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to celebrate the dairy industry and recognize milk as a globally important food.
In 2001, World Milk Day was established by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations to recognize the importance of milk as a global food, and to celebrate the dairy sector. Each year since, the benefits of milk and dairy products have been actively promoted around the world, including how dairy supports the livelihoods of one billion people. 
This year, the theme will focus on Sustainability in the dairy sector with messages around the environment, nutrition and socio-economics. In doing so we will re-introduce dairy farming to the world.
Today’s edition of Financial Express tells “The story of how India went from being milk deficient to largest dairy producer”.      A short extract:
India is the world’s largest milk producer  and accounts for over one-fifth of the global milk production, followed by the US, China, Pakistan and Brazil
The country used to be milk deficient, and imported milk from other countries to serve its growing population. It wasn't until 1965, when the Indian government decided to establish a National Dairy Development Board to develop India's dairy sector. Soon in 1970, the country aimed to enhance milk production, which led to the launch of Operation Flood. Come 1998, India surpassed the US and became the largest milk producer in the world. India's per capita availability of milk more than doubled during 1991-2018, with the production growing at a 4% CAGR.Arguably, this would be difficult to achieve had it not been for Amul — a federation made by 3.6 million milk producers in Gujarat.
Technology indeed has played a crucial role in the success of Amul Dairy (led by Dr Varghese Kurien). The company now uses Automatic Milk Collection systems that makes the collection of milk from farmers seamless and quicker. Everyday, the company can easily collect 3.3 million litres of milk from 2.12 million farmers from various villages across India. Now, Amul has 31 plants in India, with 13 of those being in Gujarat. The cooperative has four plants in Delhi NCR; two in UP; four in Maharashtra; three in Rajasthan; and one each in Chhattisgarh, Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Jammu and Kashmir.
Puresh Dairy attracts Rs 12 million investment
Tabling dairy and fresh farm produce to end customers in 'Bharat', Ranchi-based Puresh Daily  raised ₹1.2 crores (12 million) in its seed round from Dhianu Das of Alfa ventures and Agility Venture Partners last month.
Puresh offers subscription for milk produce, tabling produce from their eight franchise farms to 1200 subscribers in three cities namely Ranchi, Ramgarh and Bokaro. They offer chemical-free products through value chains augmented by AI. This allows them to provide traceable logistics, green packaging and smart payment options.
Unlike other companies which suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns in 2020, the demand for milk and fresh produce shot up as essential items. Manish and Aditya, the co-founders saw high growth within the year and expect their expansion journey to reflect the same.
"Milk is essential for India's kitchens, and we reach our customers' doors every day with healthy products - that's how we're succeeding", says cofounder Manish Piyush.
Stellapps, a WEF technology pioneer
In June 2020,Stellapps, a Bangalore- based market leader in the Indian dairy tech space, was selected among hundreds of candidates as one of the World Economic Forum’s “Technology Pioneers”.  Stellapps is a farm to consumer dairy digitization service provider, improving productivity, quality and ensuring end-to-end traceability across the dairy supply chain. 
IndiaTechOnline has reported on these tech initiatives of India’s dairy sector:
Connected Cows are key to Chitale Dairy's process automation
Indian  milk products   leader Chitale Dairy, is a pioneer in embracing  IoT -- for automating its entire operational chain 
The company consolidated its two data centres eight years ago by implementing a Dell solution featuring Dell PowerEdge M910 blade servers with Intel Xeon E7-8867L series processors running VMware vSphere virtualization software, along with Dell Compellent and Dell EqualLogic storage. However, the company needed to upgrade its network to support the internal cloud used for the data management needs of Chitale Dairy’s research farm, the monitoring of logistical efficiency and factory energy consumption, and the storage and delivery of unique animal data.
Chitale has created a strong ecosystem of farmers and producers. Each animal is tagged with a radio-frequency identifi  tion (RFID) tag that, when scanned, transmits unique information on each cow and buffalo, back to the Chitale Dairy data centre.
Now, a full fledged platform for the digital dairy
Stellapps  is a leading farm to consumer dairy digitization service provider, improving farm productivity, milk quality, and enabling supply chain traceability formilk. It leverages advanced analytics and artificial intelligence through its full-stack IoT platform to enable dairy ecosystem partnerships (financial and insurance institutions, veterinary services, cattle nutrition providers, etc.) to drive data-led value realization for all stakeholders in the milk supply - especially smallholder farmers.
Stellapps has successfully applied its SmartMoo platform (full Stack IoT solution)- spanning farm optimization, milk production, procurement, and cold chain logistics to touch over 10 million litres of milk each day.
To date  ( this story appeared in June 2020) Stellapps has deployed its solutions in more than 30,000 villages in India with 2 million  registered farmers and 1 million  registered cattle on its platform. T
TCS provides sourcing solution to Mother Dairy
 Mother Dairy, a subsidiary of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) and one of India’s leading Dairy players  has turned to Tata Consultancy Services  to help improve  its sourcing and procurement.
TCS is providing  consulting on strategy and design of centralized procurement cell, spend analysis for enhanced visibility, as well as deployment of  a Sourcing and Procurement Platform for streamlined operations. This is  helping Mother Dairy to consolidate and standardize sourcing across its 18 plants in India for categories such as Transportation, Packaging, Refrigeration Equipment and Travel.