Jamshedpur: Steel city residents won't have to face a scarcity of Medha Dairy products after June.

Jharkhand State Co-operative Milk Producers' Federation Ltd, which sells milk and milk products under the Medha Dairy brand, has decided to augment its existing cold storage facility at Baliguma near Mango to meet the rising demand from the residents of steel city and its outskirts.

"We have decided to increase the capacity of the cold storage. We will install a prefabricated facility that can be easily moved to other locations if needed. The installation is expected to be completed by June and will double the capacity of the existing facility from 5,000 litres to over 10,000 litres," general manager of Jharkhand State Cooperative Milk Producers' Federation, Narendra Sharma, said.

The cost of installing a prefabricated cold storage facility is around Rs 3 lakh. A prefabricated cold storage constitutes deep freezers, cooling units, condensers and special PCC (plain cement concrete) flooring. It requires a minimum of 500sqft floor area.

"The current facility in Jamshedpur has a floor area of over 500sqft. The demands for Medha milk and milk products (lassi, paneer and ghee) have increased substantially. When the unit runs out of stock, it has to wait for supply from Ranchi that takes nearly a day to arrive. After the increase in storage capacity, we will be able to store more products to meet the demand. It will also increase the shelf life of milk products that get damaged if not stored in proper temperature," a senior official of Jamshedpur unit, Vikas Singh, said.

During summer, the demand for Medha milk increases to over 2,000 litres per day. The requirement for lassi soars to over 3,000 litres daily while the demand for paneer increases to over 100kg.

Jharkhand Milk Federation has a processing plant of 1.2 lakh litres per day capacity at Hotwar in Ranchi. Two more processing centres are operational in Koderma (12,000 litres daily) and Latehar (10,000 litres daily). The Deogarh plant, which has a capacity of 20,000 litres, has undergone renovation earlier this year.

According to sources in the state animal husbandry department, Jharkhand has a daily milk requirement of nearly 5 lakh litres out of which around 3 lakh litres is met by Sudha Dairy (from Bihar) while the rest is taken care of by Medha Dairy and other private milk firms.