The first time I heard of Chitale Dairy was about eight years ago when an executive at one of the top Indian retailers asked me to check out how a dairy in Maharashtra’s Sangli village was using radio frequency tags to track cattle. Back then, most RFID deployments at retailers were bleeding and not delivering on early promises.
The dairy, I was told, was using intelligent tracking among other technologies to ensure its annual milk productivity was double the national average. This is the story I wrote for The Economic Times in April 2010 after spending a day at Sangli.
Earlier this month, I traveled again to Sangli to see how far has Chitale Dairy has progressed with technology. From advances in cattle genomics to use of simple, user friendly software as an underlying glue across different processes, director Vishwas Chitale continues to harness technology with precision effect in his dairy business.
Listen to this podcast to learn how a 70-year-old milk dairy in Sangli keeps at the cutting edge of technology and, as importantly, steers clear of technology hype cycles.