The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) is a statutory body set up by an Act of the Parliament of India. It is under the ownership of Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying of the Government of India. The main office is in Anand, Gujarat with regional offices throughout the country. NDDB’s subsidiaries include Indian Dairy Machinery Company Limited, Mother Dairy and Indian Immunologicals Limited, Hyderabad. The Board was created to finance and support producer-owned and controlled organisations. Its programmes and activities seek to strengthen farmer cooperatives and support national policies that are favourable to the growth of such institutions. Cooperative principles and cooperative strategies are fundamental to the board’s efforts.
Meenesh Shah is currently the Chairman of NDDB.
History
The NDDB was founded by Dr Verghese Kurien in 1965. It was created to fulfil the desire of the then-prime minister of India — Lal Bahadur Shastri to extend the success of the Kaira Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union (Amul) to other parts of India.
In year 2012, under the national dairy plan (NDP) programme, NDDB had initiated plans to boost dairy farming by targeting 40,000 villages in 14 major milk producing states including Punjab. The project was aimed at covering about 2.7 million milch animals in these states.
In October 2020, the NDDB launched a “manure management initiative” at the Mujkuva Dairy Cooperative Society (DCS) in Anand district, wherein biogas plants are installed by the dairy farmers outside their residences for producing gas to be used as cooking fuel. In addition to biogas, bio-slurry produced from these biogas plants will also be used by the farmers in their own fields for soil conditioning. Surplus bio-slurry can be sold to other farmers or converted into organic fertilisers.
In 2000, in accordance of the plans of NDDB to reach out to more states, it signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the administration of Ladakh to promote dairying and rural livelihoods in the newly formed union territory.
Other Initiatives
In one innovative approach, NDDB, in collaboration with All India Radio (AIR), launched Radio Samvad—an awareness series on radio for dairy farmers of the Vidarbha and Marathwada regions. It was planned to be broadcast as twice weekly, 30-minute episodes from Nagpur, Jalgaon, Aurangabad, Osmanabad and Nanded radio stations on subjects related to scientific dairy animal management. Subject experts from NDDB conduct the sessions.