ROURKELA: Every morning, children of Indira Colony in Sundargarh queue outside a local dairy farmer Asmit Patel’s house for their share of milk. For the last two years, he has been providing them free milk to ensure that they get some part of their daily nutritional requirement.
During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 when milk sales saw a drastic drop and there was little demand for milk-based products, he had to dump the unsold milk every day in the Ib river that flows near his house.
During one such day, he saw a group of malnourished slum children playing on the river bank. Instead of throwing the milk, he decided to feed them. It was then that he decided to distribute the surplus milk to all the children in the Indira Colony slum.
The 48-year-old dairy farmer had bought a cow in 2005 to meet the milk needs of his family and gradually, the number of cows increased and he ventured into selling milk. Today, he has 30 cattle, most of them milch cows, and he gets around 60 litres of milk per day.
“During Covid-19, I was left with 15 to 20 litres of milk every day because people could not come down to collect it. Since I could not store the surplus milk, I had to dispose of it in Ib river. But when I saw a group of children which had nothing to eat during the pandemic, I decided to give it to them for free,” said the farmer who has completed his graduation from local college.
Ever since, the slum kids carrying their own milk bottles come to his house at RRIT Colony in Sundargarh town and take milk. Everyday about 30 children aged three to eight years collect 250 ml of milk each from him.“I wish to continue this as long as possible and feed more such kids. The smile on their faces is priceless,” he said.