District Level Awareness on Dairy Entrepreneurship Development Scheme held at Namchi

NAMCHI, 21 Dec: The District Level Awareness Programme on Dairy Entrepreneurship Development Scheme (DEDS) for Bankers, NGOs, Farmers Clubs and other agencies was conducted today here at Namchi by NABARD. The objective of the Dairy Entrepreneurship Development Scheme is to promote setting up of modern dairy farms for production of clean milk, to encourage heifer calf rearing thereby conserving good breeding stock, to bring structural changes in the unorganized sector so that initial processing of milk can be taken up at the village level itself, to bring about up gradation of quality and traditional technology to handle milk on a commercial scale and to generate self – employment and provide infrastructure mainly for unorganized sector.


Assistant General Manager, NABARD Sikkim, Om Prakash briefly described these aims and objectives while inaugurating this awareness programme on Dairy Entrepreneurship Development Scheme. During the programme it was informed that farmers, individual entrepreneurs, NGOs, companies, groups of unorganized sector etc which include self help groups (SHGs) diary cooperative societies, milk unions, milk federations etc are eligible under the scheme.
An individual will be eligible to avail assistance for all the components under the scheme but only once for each component, more than one member of a family can be assisted under the scheme provided they set up separate units with separate infrastructure at different locations in which the distance between the boundaries of two such farms should be at least 500 meters.
DDM, JC Biswas in his power point presentation gave details about various schemes under the scheme and informed that back ended capital subsidy is available on the schemes of small dairy units, rearing of heifer calves (cross breed, indigenous descript milch breed of cattle and buffaloes), vermin-compost with milch animal unit, purchase of milking machines/bulk milk cooling unit, purchase of dairy processing equipments for manufacture of indigenous milk product, establishment of dairy product transportation facilities and cold chain, cold storage facilities for milk and milk products. Under the scheme subsidy at 25% (33.33% SC/ST beneficiaries) of the capital cost of the project subject to upper ceiling of Rs 10 lakh is available, he added.
Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairy and Fisheries (DAHD&F), Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India is the nodal agency to operate the scheme. NABARD will be administering the subsidy and monitoring the progress of the scheme.
The participating bank will adhere to the norms of appraising the projects regarding technical feasibility and commercial/financial viability and the participating bank should ensure insurance of the assets created under the project, whenever required. The repayment period will depend on the nature of activity and cash flow and will vary between 3-7 years, grace period may range from 3-6 months in case of dairy farms and 3-6 years for calf rearing units (to be decided by the financing bank as per needs of individual projects) and recovery of loan will be based on net loan amount only i.e. not including subsidy, which will be adjusted by the concerned bank after effective bank loan and interest thereon has been repaid.
The repayment schedules will be drawn on the total amount of the loan (including subsidy) in such a way that the subsidy amount is adjusted after liquidation of net bank loan (excluding subsidy).
The chief guest of the programme Joint Director Animal Husbandry Deptt, Namchi, DK Pradhan in his address said that the borrowers should build their confidence with their banks by ensuring timely repayment of their loans so that the bank may extend loan without any problem time and again in future. The awareness workshop also included open discussion wherein many problems were discussed.
The programme was attended by Bankers, Government officials, NGOs, Farmers Club and others.