Namakkal is a small city in Tamil Nadu situated about 375 kilometres south-west of Chennai. Visitors to Namakkal will find the place buzzing with activity, full of upmarket residential areas, hotels, educational institutions and the latest high-end cars plying the roads. Namakkal is well known in the automobile industry for its truck body-building workshops. Trucks, trailers, tankers and rig units are sent here from all over the country to have their bodies built. And trucks and rig units built here are exported to other countries as well.
What may not be so well known about the city is that Namakkal has made Tamil Nadu the country’s second-largest egg producing centre, Andhra Pradesh being the first. India is the third-largest chicken egg producing country in the word, next only to China and the US. (India produces around 75,000 million eggs a year.)
About 80% of the layer farms in Tamil Nadu are concentrated in and around Namkkal. The region is a dry semi-arid zone, where agricultural operations cannot be carried out economically due to rocky soil and shortage of water. By dedicated hard work and entrepreneurship, the poultry farmers have successfully established a large poultry pocket in this area and Namakkal has come to be known as the ‘poultry city’.
Poultry farming in Namakkal became serious business in the early 1970s when a farmer started out with a 100 layer chicken egg farm in a thatched poultry shed. A few farmers started preparing their own feed as well. The production took off in the early 1980s when the breeders started rearing poultry under tiled roofs. Many aspiring entrepreneurs rushed to set up layer farms. This resulted in many problems like overproduction, exploitation by traders, non-availability of superior hybrid layers, frequent disease outbreaks, lack of scientific knowledge in poultry rearing and quality feed preparation.
To overcome these problems, the government of Tamil Nadu started a veterinary college in Namakkal in 1985 to serve the local poultry industry. It also helped that the National Egg Coordination Committee (NECC) was set up during 1982 to fix a fair price to eggs and to avoid exploitation by the middlemen.
As poultry farming proved to be profitable, entrepreneurs started expanding their layer capacity and dropped other livestock and agriculture operations. They also started preparing their own feed and got into direct marketing to reduce production cost and improve profit margin. The poultry farms are no longer under thatched sheds. They have moved to modern multi-storied buildings. Everything is automated—from breeding, feeding, watering and egg collection. This has resulted in closure of small farms. The number of farms has come down from more than 5,000 to around 1,000, but the total poultry population has increased from 7.5 million in 1991-92 to 54 million during 2012.
Tamil Nadu accounts for 20% of eggs produced in India, of which 80% comes from the Namakkal region. However, the export of eggs and egg powder is highest from Tamil Nadu. Almost 95% of the export of shell eggs from India is from this state. More than 1,000 million eggs are exported, mostly to Afro-Asian countries, from India, of which 95% comes from Namakkal.
Exports generally start picking up during the winter season. This year the depreciation in the value of the rupee has also helped. “Rupee depreciation against the dollar is only one of the reasons why we are doing well,” says NS Kesavan, MD, NS Exports, who is also a representative of Namakkal Egg Merchant Traders Association.
“Namakkal egg exporters have always been conscious of quality and make sure that uniformity in size is maintained,” adds Kesavan. Separate batches are maintained for export and domestic markets. Larger-sized eggs produced by older chickens are offloaded in the domestic market.
Egg exports face a lot of competition from countries such as China, Pakistan and Iran. It is a cyclical business. Its fortunes are tied up with production costs, mainly the feeds. The feed requires soya and maize. If the cost of these products shoots up in the local market, then export competitiveness suffers. The poultry farmers are unfazed. The other exporting countries also face similar problems. The domestic market has been steadily picking up. Prices of eggs have been keeping pace with inflation.
An entrepreneur has set up a plant to generate power from chicken droppings to combat the power crisis in the state. “If the total poultry litter in the district is collected daily (6,000 tonnes) and processed, nearly 16 MW of power an hour can be generated, with 1,000 tonnes of manure and 10,000 litres of liquid bio-fertiliser as by-products,” says Salai Sivaprakasam, the executive director of Subhashree Bioenergies Ltd.
Sivaprakasam’s plant extracts energy from poultry excrement. It started with a capacity of 2.5 MW, later scaled up to 3.76 MW. The bird droppings are collected daily from several places and brought to the factory where it is fed into a processing unit. It emits methane gas that is converted into electricity with a patented technology. The slurry, generated as residue, is sold as manure and liquid bio-applications to farmers.
The company has also got approval from the Union government under the Clean Development Mechanism (a Kyoto Protocol component) since the plant helps to trap greenhouse gases that would otherwise be emitted by the litter left in the open. “The industry has been growing exponentially. Can you imagine how much litter is being created?” adds Sivaprakasam. He says modestly that he is doing his bit for power generation, green environment and job creation (he employs 100 people). This is one corner of India where you can still feel a sense of optimism.