Billing for your dairy in Mizoram
Packets by the delivery, jugs by the litre and curd from the milk that did not sell, all on one phone.
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Where Mizoram's milk sellers and buyers are: a market town and a farm district
A dairy sells to the district around it and buys from it too. Two districts, and what each is known for.
- Aizawl's main market held 1,073 traders and sellers in 2019, and every one of them wants tea in the morning.
- About 60 percent of Lawngtlai's people depend on agriculture and allied work, so a good number of the families that sell milk to a shop there are farmers too.
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Each delivery with its own day, local milk shared out in order and a jug read as a list
Each delivery as an item with its own day in the name
When a delivery of packets comes in, add it as an item with the day in its name, such as the packets of Tuesday. The older item shows its own count, and you can see at the counter that Tuesday's packets are still there and should go first. When the count of the older one reaches zero, you know the chiller is clear of the old ones.
Local milk shared out in the order the families asked
When a family asks for a litre of the local milk, make a bill for it then and put it on the family's page. The count of the local item goes down with each one, and when it reaches zero the later families are told so with the list in your hand. The order in which they asked is the order on the pages.
A neighbour's jug read as a list of mornings
Open a page for the woman who brings milk from her own cow and write the litres on it each morning. On the day you pay, the page reads as eight, ten, nine, and what you owe is one number. She can see the same list on her phone, and the argument about ten and eight does not start.
Ten litres of local milk and twenty families, a neighbour's jug and the packet at the back
Ten litres of local milk, and twenty families who asked for it
Most of what a Mizoram dairy sells is packet milk that came from far away. The few litres from a neighbour's cow are what the families ask for by name, and they are gone in an hour. Twenty families each think they were promised a litre, and ten are right. The ones who are wrong are angry, and you cannot prove who asked first.
Milk from a neighbour's cow, measured in a jug each morning
A woman down the lane brings milk from her own cow every morning, measured in a steel jug. Some days it is eight litres and some days ten. The litres are written on the wall by the door, or on a scrap in your shirt pocket that goes through the wash. You pay her at the end of the week from whatever the wall still says, and the wall has no dates on it.
When a landslide shuts the road, the packets on your shelf are all the milk there is
When a landslide cuts the road, the lorry does not come. For a few days the packets on your shelf are all the milk the street has, and the neighbour's jug of local milk is what the families ask for next. Two sources are asked for in turn, and you hand out what you have without knowing how many days it must last.
Tools for a dairy that sells packets, jugs and curd from one counter
Godown stock
The chiller counted apart from the shelf at the front, so the older packets at the back do not vanish from the count.
Daily reports
The litres of each day listed, so the days when the road was cut can be set beside the ordinary days and you can see what the missing packets cost.
Orders to suppliers
The order to the packet milk supplier for the days the lorry comes, written from the count in the chiller and not from a guess.
Questions Mizoram dairies ask about local milk, jugs and delivery days
The neighbour's jug is short on some mornings. How do I show her which ones?
Her page has each morning's litres. Read the short mornings out to her with their days, so the talk is about the days, not a feeling.
A family wants the local milk and a packet on one bill. Is that one line or two?
Two lines on one bill: litres for the local milk, packets for the lorry's milk. The bill shows each as it was taken, and the two counts never mix, so the evening report reads local milk and lorry milk apart.
A family asks why the shelf was bare on the landslide day. What do I tell her?
Open that day's report. It shows fewer packets sold, and the count shows the shelf empty early, so you can tell her the road was the reason and not her turn. Tell her the day the road shut, and the day the next lorry came in.
The state cooperative and the lowest daily output in the Northeast
Mizoram produced the lowest daily milk in the Northeast in 2024-25, only 64.4 thousand kilograms a day, according to the Bureau of Animal Husbandry and Statistics.
The state dairy cooperative MULCO, set up in 1983 to buy, process and sell milk, has struggled to meet demand. Most cattle feed comes from outside the state, which raises costs.