Madhya Pradesh: Milk price hike to derail household budget badly

BHOPAL: Proposed increase of milk prices by the MP Milk Federation will not only impact the household budgets, but prices of sweets, food and milk products are also likely to go up. Besides, prices of ice creams, lassi, and cold coffee, which sell like "hotcakes" to beat the heat during the summer season, will also see a hike in prices.
Market sources point out that not only milk, prices of all the ingredients which are used for making sweets and milk products have risen in the recent past and it's difficult to absorb the rising input costs anymore.
"An increase of Rs 2 per packet of 1/2 litre of milk may not look to be a significant increase at a first glance. But, if you look at it more closely, it's an increase of Rs 120 per month for a household using 1 litre of milk everyday.
And, don't forget that the prices of bread have gone up by Rs 5 per pack of 350 gram recently, prices of eggs have also gone up from time to time. So, our breakfast would be costing considerably more than it used to till recently," said Rakesh Kushwah, a middle-aged man, who was talking about the increase in milk prices of Sanchi brand from Monday with his milk parlour owner.
Ramesh Gupta, a student, who eats in a hotel, said that milk not only affects household budgets ad prices of sweets as people tend to believe but also impacts prices of food as what you normally get in hotels as vegetable at Bhopal is paneer in different forms, ice creams, chocolates, team coffee, lassi and may be several things more.
Rakesh Gupta, owner of Chhappan Bhog, when asked about the likely impact of increase in prices of milk on sweets, said "Their prices will also go up. There will be an increase of 5 to 10 percent on prices of sweets made and other milk products", he said.
Owner of Manohar Dairy, Vinay Harwani, said "It's not about milk alone. The cost of all the inputs have gone up. If it were only about milk or any other input, we would have absorbed the increase in cost but now, we shall have to rework the prices of sweets and other products sold from our restaurant and increase them.
We had been absorbing the increase in input costs as the volume of business during Coronavirus period was also affected but things are normal now and input costs have gone up to an extent that it can't be absorbed at the current level of prices anymore."