Amul reaches doorsteps of Mumbaikars
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VADODARA: The Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers Union Limited ( KDCMPUL), popularly known as Amul Dairy, will inaugurate its fully automatic plant - Amul Virar Dairy - on Sardar Patel Jayanti on October 31. Amul is reaching the doorsteps of Mumbaikars with the dairy plant at Thane in Maharashtra that will act as a benchmark for all the future plants that will come up in the Indian dairy industry.
This green field dairy has been designed and built with a total investment of Rs 180 crore and is the first across the globe with fully automatic traffic management system for milk packing operations.
Among the many firsts in the country, the plant has capacity of 50,000 litres milk reception, processing, automatic online standardization and homogenization line and dedicated fermented milk products manufacturing facilities with the use of robots. Amul's Virar plant also houses India's largest ice-cream manufacturing facility - two lakh litres per day (LLPD) - enough to ensure that Mumbaikars never run out of ice creams even at the peak of summers.
"This greenfield dairy which will be our sixth dairy plant, is spread over 11 acres of lush green mountain surroundings and is strategically situated just two kilometers away from NH-8 and easy approach from Virar, just seven kilometers away," Amul Dairy's managing director Rahul Kumar told TOI. "With an installed capacity to process 10 LLPD, the plant's capacity is expandable to process 20 LLPD milk, buttermilk and curd apart from two LLPD ice-cream manufacturing," he said.
On environment front, the plant has a rainwater harvesting system to recharge ground water and help its conservation, also introduced for the first time by any dairy union. Amul has set a target of procuring milk up to two LLPD locally by setting up co-operative societies on Amul pattern in the region to improve the socio economic conditions of farmers.
So far, it has already involved 500 farmers of the region by starting four village level milk societies in the interior villages.Operations such as conveying of crates, packed pouches from high speed packing machines and filling of pouches in crates by robots are fully automated and controlled through centralized computer monitoring system. The high speed packing machines have been integrated with online check weighers, robotic operations in order to avoid human touch of products and CCTV cameras have been installed to monitor plant's activities from dairy's head office in milk city - Anand.
For real time monitoring, web-based automatic links Virar plant to Anand. The plant will be inaugurated by Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar and Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan.
