Sumul Transforms Farmers' Lives With IT

Sumul or The Surat District Co-operative Milk Union is one among the 12 district unions, which act as the manufacturing hubs for the dairy products that the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Limited brings to the market. Sumul has been quite aggressive in making use of technology to not only improve business dynamics but also the lives of the farmers it works with. Satyen Naik, manager-IT, Sumul Dairy, in conversation with Biztech2.com, gives an insight into some of the important IT initiatives that the dairy has embraced.

Could you shed light on the most significant IT initiatives at Sumul?

We have developed an in-house ERP kind of software, which broadly covers our requirements at the village, dairy and customer level. We are catering to more than 250 lakh farmers. We have set up an automatic milk collection system in the villages where these farmers live, which provides the farmer with information on the milk supplied by him. At the dairy level, this system covers all key functions like production, sales, purchase and finance. We have more than 8 lakh cattle and about 50-60 doctors to take care of them.

The software also has modules related to veterinary care. We are trying to help the doctors involved by providing them with animal health-related information on their mobile phones and PDAs. The software helps in animal care with features like classification of diseases, details on actions to be taken to overcome the same, maintaining inventory of health-protective medicines and a database of information related to animal reproduction.

The software has been developed using Oracle technology with UNIX as a platform.

How has IT transformed the lives of village farmers?

Before these IT initiatives were undertaken, our business lacked transparency. Earlier, we did not have any record of the amount of milk deposited by farmers every day and the remuneration given to them for the same. This led to exploitation of farmers by milk traders. So we decided to set up automatic milk collection centres at the village level. This system issues a transaction slip to the farmer everyday, which reflects the quantity of milk as well as the fat content of the milk. This has helped farmers to keep track of payment dues. It has helped them get better remuneration for the quantity of milk supplied by them. Overall, this transparency has transformed their lives.

What kind of initiatives is Sumul dairy looking at for the future?

Our topmost priority is the connectivity project through which we are aiming to deliver services at the individual village level. For this purpose, we are setting up India’s biggest WAN in Gujarat. We also have a vision to set up milk ATMs on this network. These ATMs will allow farmers to get immediate payment for the quantity of milk supplied by them. Once we have a full-fledged network, we will be setting up a multi-lingual portal for farmers. It will provide information related to animal health, milk quality, production and other details for which earlier they had to travel to Sumul’s office. They will be to get details on any transaction they have made with us. We will be using .net technology for the development of this portal.

Have you tried using RFID technology to keep track of the animals?

We have recently tried to use RFID tags for animals. Through the RFID reader, the animal’s health-related data can be transferred to PDAs. After using RFID tags, we have seen some shocking results. The anaemic condition of animals was not up to the mark, for which we had to take certain necessary steps. This was brought to light by the RFID reader. It is not an expensive solution; however, the tags have to be maintained constantly as they are placed under the animal’s skin. We have gone for dual side RFID tags, so in case if they break or are damaged from one side, the other side will still work.