Baljit Singh Redhu, the CMD of Lakshya Food, was one of the four NEDAC–Rural Voice awardees for 2021. Kailash Choudhary, Union Minister of State (MoS) for Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare, presented the inaugural edition of the awards at the Rural Voice Agriculture Conclave in New Delhi on December 23, 2021.
Redhu, son of Jagar Singh, was born in a farmer family at Bohatwala in the Jind district of Haryana in 1963. He got his primary education at the village school and secondary education in Jind. He completed his graduation from Govt College, Jind and got a diploma in Civil Engineering from CR Polytechnic College, Rohtak.
Right from the beginning, Redhu had the village farmers' welfare as his aim. To achieve this aim, he started with a small hatchery in 1996 in his own village Bohatwala. There were 10,000 parent birds in the hatchery. The young, dynamic entrepreneur aimed more at employment than at profit-seeking. He provided employment to the youth in supplying broiler chicks, poultry feed and poultry medicine. He motivated them to earn for their family and children.
However, Redhu also wanted to do something remarkable in the dairy sector. He established a modern dairy farm in his own village with the latest technology and equipment. His vision is to bring dairy farming, Murrah buffaloes and Haryana on the world map. He focused on finding milk productivity and yearly calving from Murrah’s selection and grading.
With his progressive aim, Redhu also established a milk processing plant Lakshya at Kandela in Jind. His aim was to provide pure milk, milk products and ghee to the people of Haryana. He established a network of distributors at the city level and booths at the village level. He established village-level collection centres (VLCs) across Haryana and provided employment to more than 50,000 youths of the State.
Lakshya stands out among other milk plants on account of its strong backward and forward linkage. The procurement of raw milk occurs through multiple channels. One, the company’s own dairy farms contribute about 25 per cent of the total milk collected per day. The 1500-plus cattle comprise the high-yielding Holstein Friesian (HF) cows and the indigenous Murrah buffaloes. Two, Lakshya collects milk from its VLCs. And three, it does so from other organized farms spread all over the state.
Says Redhu, “Our vision is to empower the rural dairy and allied agribusiness entrepreneurs of the state and the country by way of offering the latest technological and management inputs through a consolidated network of technical services and professionals with the strong objective of enabling our fellow farmers towards a better quality of life for themselves and their families.”
The NEDAC-Rural Voice awards have been instituted jointly by the Network for the Development of Agricultural Cooperatives in Asia and the Pacific (NEDAC) and Rural Voice to recognize excellence in the field of agriculture, rural affairs and cooperatives.