The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs has approved implementation of special livestock sector packages consisting of several activities by realignment and revision of various components of the central government. The committee is chaired by the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. These schemes are for next 5 years starting from the financial year 2021-22 in order to boost growth in the livestock sector and making animal husbandry more beneficial to the nearly 10 crore farmers engaged in animal husbandry sector.
This package contains the central government’s support worth Rs. 9800 crore over duration of 5 years for leveraging total investment of Rs. 54,618 crore. This investment will include share of investments by various state governments, financial institutions, state cooperatives, external funding agencies and other stakeholder of animal husbandry.
All the schemes of the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying will be merged into three broad categories as Development Programs. These includes Rashtriya Gokul Mission, National Program for Dairy Development (NPDD), National Livestock Mission (NLM) and Livestock Census and Integrated Sample Survey (LC & ISS) as sub-schemes. The Disease Control program will be renamed as Livestock Health and Disease Control (LH & DC) which includes the present Livestock Health and Disease Control (LH & DC) scheme and National Animal Disease Control Program (NADCP). And the Infrastructure Development Fund where the Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Development fund (AHIDF) and the Dairy Infrastructure Development Fund (DIDF) are merged, and the present scheme for support to Dairy Cooperatives and Farmer Producer Organizations engaged in Dairy activities will be included in the third category.
The Rashtriya Gokul Mission will help in preservation and development of indigenous breeds and would also contribute in improving the economic condition of the rural farmers. The National Program for Dairy Development (NPDD) scheme has a revision to target the installation of about 8900 bulk milk coolers, thus providing benefit to more than 8 lakh milk producers and 20 LLPD milk will be additionally procured from them. Under NPDD, financial assistance from Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) will be availed to strengthen existing and create fresh infrastructure in nearly 4500 villages.
