NOW SERVING: DAIRY OF A DIFFERENT KIND

It does taste a little unusual. Around Diwali last year, dairy brand Amul launched its first product made from the milk of an animal other than the cow or buffalo. Bars of camel milk chocolate, smooth, slightly dry, made their way to online retailers and a few big-city shops. It was an experiment of sorts. Lives and livelihoods depended on India’s reaction.

The milk had come from camels in Gujarat’s arid Bhuj region. Nomadic Rabari herders were persuaded to sell the milk to the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), India’s largest milk provider, which markets Amul. The tribe subsists on camel milk but considers selling it a taboo. Amul’s move is meant to help generate income and prevent camel-herding from dying out as a profession.

Almost a year on, RS Sodhi, who heads the Federation, says the pilot project has been a success. “Camel milk is saltier,” he says. “We turned the milk into milk powder and adapted the chocolate recipe to fit commercial tastes. The flavour is more minerally, but people have loved the idea.”

The cooperative is now planning to expand the initiative, shipping out packaged camel milk and larger stocks of chocolate across India. The road ahead, however, is not without humps.

SANDS OF TIME

Across semi-arid regions in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Haryana, nomadic herders are struggling. They traditionally sold camels at fairs, but there are few takers for the animals in a tractor and truck world. Growing villages, mining and government restrictions have shrunk grazing lands as well.

Efforts to popularise camel milk have been on since 2000, when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of its production and consumption. Ilse Kohler-rollefson, a German anthropologist who has lived in India for 20 years and has founded a non-profit for pastoralists in Rajasthan, was among the first to get camel keepers to consider dairy farming.

Progress was slow. “They were battling the traditional thinking that camel milk and milk products should not be sold,” she says. “No one outside the community valued the milk. People mistakenly believed it was unpalatable and curdled more quickly.”

Slowly, cottage industries sprung up in Rajasthan, selling camel milk packaged,