On Merit

Operation Deluge PEREIRA (September 28) and Sastry (October 6) have once again, using elementary arithmetic, pointed at the statistical deluge created by NDDB's Operation Flood Project (OFP), Tiishaar Shah (August 25) in his diatribe would have the readers believe only in the value terms. It is not difficult to convert value terms into quantity terms using Shah's deluge of NDDB's figures. Assuming a producer price of Rs 4 per litre one can see that Shah's figure give quantity of milk collection by 45000 dairy co-operative societies (DCS) in the country. It showed that these DCS were able to collect a mere 6.65 per cent of the domestic milk production per annum. Obviously, as pointed out by Pereira, there is leakage out of the OFP system if the domestic milk production has been growing purportedly at an annual rate of over 6 per cent during the late eighties. My personal experience of over a decade in the field shows that there has been a mushrooming of private milk traders in the OFP areas since 1980. It is important to question this development. Perhaps it explains why the per DCS milk collection per day has been falling from 1981-82 (Operation Flood: A Progress