Maharashtra FDA Will Deploy Digital Milk-Tracking System
Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing a centralised digital traceability platform for raw milk procurement, according to an announcement by its commissioner, Tukaram Mundhe. The system is intended to connect animal identification records with data from village collection centres and to track milk batches to their producers.
The planned platform will combine livestock census information held by the Animal Husbandry Department with records from primary milk collection points. Cattle and buffaloes in India are assigned unique 12-digit identification numbers through RFID-enabled ear tags under the national livestock database. The FDA plans to associate those identities with readings from digital weighing and milk-testing equipment used when milk is delivered.
Those records would allow the software to establish expected production levels for registered herds. An alert would be generated if the volume attributed to a farmer or local aggregator exceeded the output considered possible from the animals registered to that producer. The FDA’s proposed timetable places the rollout between six and 12 months from the announcement.
The initiative coincides with inspections of informal collection hubs and chilling centres. Mundhe said enforcement teams had mapped and begun comprehensive physical audits at hundreds of bulk collection centres in Maharashtra’s principal dairy districts. The checks are aimed at bringing scrutiny closer to the point where milk is assembled, rather than relying only on samples taken from packaged products or bulk tankers.
The FDA has identified water, reconstituted skimmed-milk powder and synthetic chemical emulsions among the substances that could be detected through discrepancies between recorded volumes and registered animal capacity. The wider enforcement operation also concerns unauthorised stabilisers, urea, detergent bases and unapproved vegetable fats used in fraudulent milk blending, according to the agency’s account of the programme.
Mahanand and Amul, together with private dairy processors operating in western India, use automated milk analysers, bacterial-screening equipment and refrigerated transport, the source said. The proposed traceability network would also record genuine production volumes and link procurement payments to the performance of tagged livestock. The source said this could help address distorted fat and solids-not-fat measurements and protect payments to smallholder farmers when diluted or synthetic milk enters regional procurement channels.
