Dudhwala Number One

He’s rushing back to his office from inspecting the quality of cattle-feed at a Sudha Dairy plant, and calls for the latest sales figures on ‘Mattha’ or sour buttermilk.

You ask him about the award.
“Huh,” says Patna Dairy Project Managing Director SB Sinha, “which award?”
“Didn’t you get an award at Delhi, recently?” we ask.
“Oh, the Best National Productivity Award. Yes, we came first in the Dairy Development and Production Sector. It’s a great honour. Now, where are those sales figures?”

Make no mistake, the National Award for 2005-06 is no mean achievement, with the Vaishal Patliputra Dugdh Utpadak Sahakari Sangh [Patna Dairy Project is its popular short-form] becoming the number one milk production cooperative in the country in terms of procurement, production, and profits.
And this is possible in Bihar, the butt of bad publicity!
“Awards are very important milestones, and it’s a tremendous honour”, says Sinha, “but we’ve got to scale new heights. I’m monitoring the progress of the latest addition to our product range, Sudha Mattha.”

The National Productivity Awards were instituted in 1982 with the objective of recognising and encouraging organisations that excel in their respective fields.
This is the third time that the Patna Dairy Project received the award.

“You may say that the figures speak for themselves. We procure over 175 thousand litres of milk every day from a network of over 1285 village dairy societies spread over four districts. This is accomplished in spite of heat, water-logging, bad roads, erratic power supply, and many other challenges. We pass on more than 80 crores of rupees every year to these milk producers as the price of milk, thus improving the social and economic conditions of the households. Our excellent performance and good management practices have earned us international certification for quality and food safety management, ISO 9001:2000 and HACCP. We have achieved a commendable 21% growth in milk sales alone. All our milk products including table butter, ghee, peda, lassi, icecream, paneer enjoy a very high reputation among consumers and this is reflected in our rapidly growing sale trends.”


FRANK KRISHNER

Bihar's Vijay Mallya?

Restaurateur, Property Developer, Realtor, and recently acclaimed Maruti Udyog Limited Best Entrepreneur of the year Rakesh Kumar Sinha is considering a career switch. Like his inspiration, Vijay Mallya, he might become a parliamentarian, to contribute towards a new, vibrant Bihar.

At sixteen, his dad presented him a Mercedes while he was still a student at St. Xavier’s Patna. At eighteen, while a studying at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, news came that his father, the well known businessman and philanthropist Shashi Babu was no more. An only son, he had no option but to take over his father’s business at that early age. Sinha has recently returned from Athens with the Maruti Udyog Limited Best Young Entrepreneur of the Year award . He received the award at an All India dealer’s conference in Greece to felicitate Maruti authorised dealers.

‘My individual mantra is to thing big and have the courage to invest,” says Sinha, inspired by the Vijay Mallya Kingfisher idea. His two year old car dealership not only beat Calcutta based dealers during the recent Durga Puja by festival selling over 350 cars in three days, his Vau’s Automobiles is the only one from Bihar, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, and Orissa to make the top 25 in the country.

Sinha took the plunge and invested in a state of the art, all glass showroom and automobile workshop at a time when other dealers were apprehensive to keep shutters open beyond 7 p.m. “In a sense, I am a pioneer. I’m not just selling a car, I’m selling a beautiful experience, an aspiration. People said that my glass windows would be smashed and that Bihar was too rowdy a place to take such a risk. Yet I gave people a beautiful show-room and kept my lights on till eleven pm. Nothing happened. This gave others the courage to invest in beautiful showrooms as well.”

“I want to enter the Lok Sabha to provide a fresh dimension to politics and governance. It’s a dream to do something different, not just earn money. Of that I have enough. I’d like to do something that will add more respect to my family name, and honour my father’s memory, he says.

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Never a dull moment at FCI

The Food Corporation of India may not have a romantic-sounding name, but it’s a vital link in ensuring the continued health of our farmers, points out FCI General Manager A K Verma, who has engineered a visible growth in grain procurement in Bihar since he took over the reins in February 2003.

Juggling between 127 procurement centres and 48 granaries is no easy task. The FCI, being a Central agency, coordinates with the Bihar Government and PACs or Primary Agricultural Cooperatives. It procures wheat and rice at the Minimum Sale price fixed by the government every year.

It also ensures that the grains are moved to the public distribution system, as well as the various government schemes. It’s a tricky business, explains Verma, given that the godowns are limited.

The stock has to move from the warehouses to the people to make place for more procurement.

Getting procurement figures up from around 24 thousand tons to 1,64,000 in his first year was no sedate desk job. It was a challenge. Staff had to be motivated.

“Actually, there’s never a dull moment. Think of this. When our FCI personnel move into the field, they are upsetting the cart of some vested interest or the other. A powerful goonda may have the monopoly and the poor farmers have no option but to pay him at whatever low rate he offers. Now when we offer a better price, the fellow’s monopoly is threatened. So what does he do? He will obviously put some pressure on our man in the field. Who wants to go to a remote location to get killed or kidnapped?"

Ensuring continuing and consistent backup from the state law and order machinery for the man on the field is an important task. Today, with excellent coordination between FCI personnel and the District administration, vested interests by and large have been thwarted, says Verma. In times of crisis, such as a flood or an earthquake, FCI takes a direct role in ensuring that rice or wheat reaches the affected populations in tandem with the state government.

Farmers are the gainers when they sell to FCI, because the payment is immediate, and there is no red tape. “After all, we are working in the interest of the cultivators so that they get a stable price,” says Verma. When there is a glut of grains in the state and the prices fall so low that farmers find it impossible to recover even their invested capital, the FCI has to step in and do whatever it can within reasonable limits to give them a fair deal.

An art student's protest

Ragging has suddenly become the hot topic of debate, with Indians seeing it as an oppressivbe practice. in the US, 'pledging' or joining a fraternity at college has similar and even more bizarre practices, but nobody becomes so protective there.

Stripping off one's clothes and doing crazy things are all part of the 'dare'.

In India, however, the cultural, sociologocal, political and caste consepts and the Victorian legacy rolled into one make the practice of hazing a very grey area. Several unfortunate cases have come to light. A section of the students feel it's prudishness and stupidity on the part of the 'no-ragging activists'. Victims and their families have a different take, especially when some first year students ended up dead.

Prashant, a student from the Government college of Arts and Crafts, Patna, Bihar exhibited a painting aptly entitled 'First Year' which sought to communicate his own feelings when he had undergone a similar 'initiation' as a fresher in College.

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