Thesis: In the world’s largest milk-producing market, large dairies, private investors, startups, and even cooperatives have a narrow focus: the quantity of milk, its fat and non-soluble fat (SNF) content on the one hand, and the retail customer on the other. The ~$30 billion industry that largely runs on these two rails is a tell-tale patchwork of peaks, plateaus, and plunges. Nearly three-fourths of the 80 million farmers pouring milk into village-level collection centres are unorganised, unwittingly milking their livelihood and cattle to the point of self-defeat.

Counterthesis: Nitara, which means deep roots, is a platform that gets farmers and their ecosystem friends—vets, feed and medicine suppliers, artificial insemination providers, financial lenders, and insurers—within digital reach. In linking nutrition, breeding, herd and disease management for cattle, Nitara has mapped the entire gene pool of India, perhaps the first company in the world to do so. Manish Jain, a former investment banker with DSP Merril Lynch and Deutsche Bank, believes his farmer-to-friend (F2F) approach can raise the productivityResearch GateLow Productivity of Indian Dairy Animals: Challenges & Mitigation Strategies Low Productivity of Indian Dairy Animals: Challenges & Mitigation Strategies and quality of Indian dairy that the country urgentlyDown To EarthIndia needs a Green Fodder Revolution needs.

Data from nearly 25,000 farmers and 140,000 cattle on the platform has led Jain to “conservatively” claim a 100% and 50% productivity gain for farmers and non-farmers, respectively, within the first 12 months. In October, Nitara won the International Dairy Federation’s innovation award at the World Summit in Santiago, Chile. Self-funded and averse to any external funding or publicity, Jain’s five out of eight years of dairy daredevilry have been “full of failures”. But he’s girding up.

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“Rather than us selecting, we leave it to the farmers to select us”

In Gujarat, there is a village called Vasavad. Six months back, three poor-quality dairies collected 600 litres of milk. They had a bad reputation for selling adulterated milk. Banks wouldn’t lend to the farmers from this village. Today, after Nitara’s intervention, milk procurement has gone up to 2,000 litres, and four quality-focused dairies are buying milk from that village.

Essentially, milk cannot triple in six months from the same cows, but as the tide started turning for farmers, people started seeing the long-term benefits of our platform.