Solar-powered bulk milk chillers are helping women in 100 Marathwada villages store milk locally and earn directly from dairy.
Around 3,000 to 3,500 women in drought-prone Dharashiv and Latur are benefiting from the village-level cold storage network.
The centres collect about 13,500 litres of milk a day and allow payments to be credited directly to women’s bank accounts every 10 days.
The solar-backed cold chain also reduces milk spoilage, cuts dependence on diesel generators and is estimated to save about 150 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.
Kalinda Ashok Survase, 45, gives water and fodder to her two cows at a shed in front of her home in Jahagirdarwadi village in Maharashtra’s Dharashiv district. She then cleans the shed and milks the cows, each of which gives two to three litres of milk in the morning and again in the evening.
Survase takes the milk to the nearby Laxmi Dairy, a village-level collection centre operated by Manjiri Farmers Producers Company, an FPO supported by Swayam Shikshan Prayog, a Pune-based non-governmental organisation. The dairy is powered by solar energy. Survase earns Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 a day by selling 12 to 16 litres of milk at around Rs 40 a litre. The payment is deposited into her bank account every 10 days.
“Earlier, my husband would cycle four kilometres to a nearby village to reach a milk collection centre of a local dairy,” she said. “He had to go immediately because high temperatures would affect the milk quality, which meant lower rates. I do not have a refrigerator to store milk on days when my husband is not available or has other work.”
She no longer relies on her husband to supply milk to the dairy. The income is now in her hands, giving her the financial independence to decide how to use it, instead of seeing it spent by her husband.
Shubhashree Chakraborty, associate director of the India Agrivoltaics Alliance, said women are the backbone of India’s dairy sector and are often the first to absorb the impact when cold-chain infrastructure is weak. “If milk spoils, it affects household cash flow. Beyond income loss, it creates uncertainty, additional labour pressure and dependence on informal local systems where women have limited decision-making power,” she said.
“In many cases, such as solar-powered cold storage for milk, decentralised chilling infrastructure also enables greater participation of women-led dairy collectives and producer companies because village-level aggregation becomes more viable and reliable.”
The dairy sector contributes 3.5 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) report.
The cold chain is the second-largest contributor of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in dairy operations, producing 0.22 kilogrammes of CO2 equivalent for every 1 kg of milk produced, the report said.
The Energy and Resources Institute and the National Dairy Development Board are currently mapping the carbon footprint of India’s dairy sector.
According to the WWF report, cooling and chilling account for nearly 25 per cent to 30 per cent of total energy consumption in dairy operations.
Experts say decarbonising the dairy sector is important if India is to meet its target of reaching net zero emissions by 2070.
The Union Ministry of Food Processing Industries (MoFPI) offers financial assistance under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana’s Integrated Cold Chain and Value Addition Infrastructure scheme to deploy renewable energy for cold storage of perishable products, including dairy.
The dairy sector can also seek subsidies and collateral-free loans under the Union Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) schemes, including the Grid Connected Rooftop Solar scheme.
The MoFPI and MNRE did not respond to emailed queries seeking details on the scale of renewable energy adoption in the dairy sector, the energy saved and the reduction in CO2 emissions.
Kolhapur Zilla Sahakari Dudh Utpadak Sangh Ltd, known as Gokul Milk Cooperative, is one of Maharashtra’s major dairy cooperatives. Based in Kolhapur, it collects an average of 1.7 million litres of milk a day.
The cooperative has deployed one 6.5 megawatt open-access solar plant and two rooftop solar systems of 995 kilowatt (kW) and 325 kW capacity.
Together, these systems save about Rs 7 crore in electricity bills and reduce emissions by 4,578 tonnes of CO2 annually, according to the cooperative.
Around 450,000 dairy farmers, including more than 200,000 women, sell milk daily to Gokul through more than 100 societies.
“The amount we save through solar adoption to power dairy operations is ultimately given as a benefit to all farmers, including women,” said Sachin Patil, public relations officer at Gokul. “Our milk rates, currently Rs 38 for cow milk and Rs 54 for buffalo milk, remain constant regardless of market fluctuations. If the government increases the milk rate by Rs 1, we increase it by Rs 1.5 to Rs 2. If the government decreases the rate, we either do not decrease it or reduce it only minimally. This is possible due to savings through solar adoption and other factors, such as increases in milk powder rates in the market.”
Experts and government officials say women are the real beneficiaries because they form the backbone of the dairy industry, even though their labour often remains invisible.
An official from Maharashtra’s Animal Husbandry and Dairying Department said more than 70 milk cooperatives out of total 13,984, with at least 70,000 farmers, had adopted bulk milk chillers with a capacity of 2,000 to 3,000 litres under schemes such as the Integrated Cold Chain and Value Addition Scheme or through their own resources. The state also supports solar-powered khawa, or reduced milk, production in Dharashiv. However, the department does not maintain a separate record of renewable energy adoption by dairy units.
In Jahagirdarwadi, 37-year-old Rankhambe Nitin Rankhambe runs Laxmi Dairy from a 10 feet by 10ft room at the front of her house. The room has brick walls, an aluminium sheet roof and an open front. A solar-powered bulk milk chiller occupies the left half of the room. Machines to chill milk, check fat content and weigh milk are placed in one corner.
When Survase arrives with milk, Rankhambe takes a 10 millilitre sample, cools it in a chilling machine and then tests its solid-not-fat content using an analyser. She then pours all the milk into a can placed on a weighing machine.
Rankhambe enters Survase’s assigned number into a mobile app, which automatically calculates the payment based on fat content and weight. Survase receives a text message with the day’s milk value. Every 10 days, the amount is credited to her bank account.
Rankhambe and her husband previously worked as sugarcane cutters for 10 years. She would work from 6 am to 7 pm in harsh sun or winter for five months a year. Her husband would receive the payment from the contractor. Later, the couple cultivated crops on their two acres and also worked as farm labourers.
“I would earn Rs 250 a day for tilling, weeding or harvesting as a labourer for two to five days a week, depending on the season,” Rankhambe said. “Work is available four to five days a week during the harvest season, but there is no work during summer in this region because of lack of water for farming.”
Like Survase, she also managed the work of caring for two cows at home, but her husband received the money. Now Rankhambe works three to four hours a day at the bulk milk chiller centre, collecting milk from all 33 women members of the FPO in the village.
“If there is a glitch, such as the BMC stopping, I inform technicians, who come to repair it,” she said. “Otherwise, 30 litres of water put in the tank above the BMC is sufficient for cooling for a month.” She now earns Rs 5,000 a month to run the centre, a commission of Rs 1 for every litre of milk she collects, and income from selling 10 to 12 litres of milk from her own two cows at the dairy.
Maharashtra is among India’s top five milk-producing states, with annual production of 16 million tonnes. It contributes 6.7 per cent of India’s milk. About 7.5 million households in the state are involved in the dairy sector. Landless labourers account for 8 per cent to 10 per cent of dairy households, while small and marginal farmers own 80 per cent of cattle in the state. Women make up about 70 per cent of livestock management work in Maharashtra.
Landless and marginalised farmers, many of them women from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, Nomadic Tribe, Denotified Tribe and other minority communities, often come from poor socio-economic backgrounds.
They rear cattle, feed and water them, clean sheds and milk the animals. Marginalised families generally own one to five cattle, either cows, buffaloes or both, as a source of supplementary income.
One animal gives two to seven litres of milk at a time, depending on breed, fodder and season. A cow producing an average of six litres a day at Rs 40 a litre can provide a family with Rs 240 a day.
For many rural households, dairy income has become a primary source of income because of shrinking village-level livelihoods, fewer farm jobs due to climate shocks, mechanisation and water scarcity in Marathwada and Vidarbha.
Madhura Swaminathan, trustee and researcher at the Foundation for Agrarian Studies, who has studied women in livestock, said dairy work is largely family-based in many states, with women doing most of the rearing work.
“They work 100 days a year for two cattle and earn Rs 100 a day or less, which is less than half the minimum wage,” she said. “If they are given charge of value addition of milk, such as running cold storage, their income will go up per day.”
Swayam Shikshan Prayog, through three farmer producer companies, runs 100 solar-backed bulk milk chillers in 100 villages across three blocks of Dharashiv district, Dharashiv, Kalamb and Washi, and one block in Latur district, Ausa.
Each bulk milk chiller is powered by 3 kW solar panels and can store 250 litres of milk.
Dipali Thodsare, Dharashiv district coordinator and chief executive of Manjiri Sakhi FPO, said the network collects an average of 13,500 litres of milk every day from centres under Rajlaxmi Dairy, run by SSP. The milk is then sold to local dairies and in the retail market.
“Each BMC, run by a single woman or a group of women, collects milk from about 40 women dairy farmers twice a day,” she said.
Around 3,000 to 3,500 women from four blocks of drought-affected Marathwada benefit from the project. According to SSP, one solar BMC of 1,000 litres capacity saves six tonnes of CO2 a year. Its 100 BMCs of 250 litres capacity therefore save 150 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.
“BMCs store milk from the evening batch and the morning batch. A transport vehicle collects that milk once a day, unlike traditional dairies, where milk is collected twice a day. This saves the emissions of 15 to 17 vehicles collecting milk from 100 villages one extra time,” Thodsare said.
Bharavnath Shongare, who owns a Tata jeep, collects milk from SSP BMCs in seven villages in Dharashiv taluka, covering 150km in one trip. “Now I have to collect milk only once a day. I save 10 to 15 litres of diesel a day,” he said.
This saves around 30 kg of CO2 emissions a day, or about 10 tonnes annually, across seven villages. BMCs in 100 villages save at least 100 tonnes of emissions annually from reduced transport alone.
In Pomadevi Jawalga village in Latur’s Ausa block, Suvarna Bbhishan Mali runs a bulk milk chiller under Swayam Sakhi Shetmal Producer Company. She said solarisation of the chiller since last year had saved her Rs 1,800 to Rs 2,000 a month in electricity bills.
“Power generally goes off for two to three hours in the village,” she said. “Electricity poles or cables also get damaged during the rainy season and remain non-functional for one or two days. Earlier, before solarisation, we had to hurriedly send milk to Rajlaxmi Dairy, 20km away in Ausa MIDC. With solar panels, we can store milk for 24 hours.”
A local dairy owner said diesel generators are often needed to power BMCs when electricity fails.
“We have to run a generator on diesel when electricity goes off, and that happens for one to two hours a day in this area,” the owner said.
Chakraborty said much of the rural dairy cold chain still depends on diesel generators and unreliable grid electricity. “That causes higher operating costs, energy insecurity, milk spoilage and avoidable emissions,” she said. “Milk is collected from villages, often in areas where electricity reliability is inconsistent, and the cooling chain becomes difficult during peak summer months.”
She said decentralised systems such as solar-powered milk chillers and energy-efficient refrigeration are important. “If milk can be chilled immediately at the village collection point, it improves milk quality, reduces spoilage, reduces dependence on diesel backup and lowers operational costs over time,” she said.
Rankhambe said the centre has changed her life. “Now I work from the comfort of my home,” she said. “Despite being almost illiterate, I can handle machines at the dairy, UPI and banking. That was unimaginable for me a few years ago.”
She is also proud that she has been able to support her second daughter’s BSc Agriculture degree. Her elder daughter had to be married after Class XII because the family lacked money at the time.
This story is supported by the Just Transition Research Centre fellowship offered jointly by IIT Kanpur, Climate Trends and the Earth Journalism Network.