Donkey’s milk great for soap

WASIM has been earning from his donkeys for years by putting them out to work at construction sites and getting `300 to `350 a day. But now he has found that he can sell donkey milk for `2,000 a litre — a veritable windfall, considering that a female donkey yields 500 to 700 ml of milk a day and Wasim and his brothers together own 15 donkeys.

Organiko, a start-up, buys donkey milk to make soap which sells at `499 for a 100-gm cake and is supposed to possess several cosmetic and therapeutic benefits. The enterprise was founded in August 2017 and it is still early days for its branded soap. But 500 cakes have sold easily and the anticipation is that the demand will be big.

At 4.30 am team members of Organiko reach Dasna village, 11 km from Ghaziabad, to collect milk from Wasim. It is transported to their office-cum- production unit at  Loni,  also  in Ghaziabad district, and made into Organiko branded donkey milk soap.

Organiko pays Wasim `2,000 on the spot for a litre of donkey’s milk collected on alternate days. Collecting the milk every day would mean baby donkeys would lose out.

As a socially driven enterprise, it is important to Organiko to change the status of the donkey, an exploited and neglected beast of burden, and also provide a robust income to extremely poor nomadic communities who own donkeys.

The additional income has improved living standards for Wasim’s 12-member joint family. “The children go to school. We have bought five more donkeys with our earnings. We have improved the organic feed of our animals and take better care of them. Earlier, we regarded donkeys as a burden though they did back-breaking work at construction sites. They were let loose to wander around in search of food in the colony or fields but now they are seldom out of our sight. Life is good,” says Wasim with a smile.

The soap claims to have anti-aging properties, vitamins and minerals. It moisturizes and alleviates skin ailments like eczema, psoriasis and acne, and protects against bacterial infections. The soap is wholly organic and comes in two variants, Donkey Milk Natural Ingredients and Donkey Milk Charcoal & Honey. Each cake is packaged attractively in arecanut leaves procured from a Self-Help Group (SHG) in Chennai.

 “The motive behind Organiko is to create stable livelihoods for donkey owners by using their own, untapped resource of donkey’s milk,” says Pooja Kaul, the young founder of Organiko who is partnered by Rishabh Yash Tomar.

Both are postgraduates in social innovations and entrepreneurship from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) School of Rural Development in Tuljapur in Osmanabad district of Maharashtra.

Wasim would like Organiko to buy the milk every day. But the new venture will only buy 150 to 200 ml per donkey and that too on alternate days so that young donkeys aren’t deprived of their nutritional needs.

“If we deviate from this humane principle the donkey mothers and their babies will suffer. We do not want them to go the way of cows and buffaloes that are milked unnaturally. To get donkey owners like Wasim to understand this is an enormous challenge,” says Kaul.

How did Kaul think up an idea that combines social purpose with profit? She says she has always been interested in the dairy sector. Her brother told her about a company in Switzerland that ran a donkey dairy farm and sold donkey’s milk directly to consumers.

Kaul and Tomar began testing the waters. In 2016, as part of the TISS curriculum, they began a pilot project to check out the feasibility of starting a donkey dairy business in Solapur, Maharashtra. 

A baseline survey of donkeys and their owners in Solapur, which is 50 km from the Tuljapur TISS campus, was undertaken. Kaul found that the donkey owners were mainly from denotified nomadic communities. Extremely poor and illiterate, they toiled, with their donkeys, for 12 to 14 hours in Solapur’s brick kilns or at construction sites. They earned just `150 to `300 per day for back-breaking work.

The donkey owners didn’t know that their much maligned animals could be a rich resource. Kaul and Tomar discovered that some European companies in the donkey milk cosmetics business were flourishing. Their products tapped the premium segment and were picked up in a big way by consumers.

They decided to try their hand at soap-making. Kaul had already dabbled in making soap and later honed her skills at a workshop in Mumbai. By 4 am they would go off to Solapur, buy donkey’s milk from the community, take it back to a rented room in Tuljapur and start making soap.

“The best part of our intervention is that donkey owners who used to abandon their donkeys after making them work for four or five months, now shelter and feed them,” says Kaul. However, the status of the male donkey is still unclear. Kaul says that Organiko has wider impact since entire families benefit from the project. “It is a great achievement for a social start-up,” says Kaul, “even though it may take time to grow volumes.”

So it looks like the much derided donkey will finally have its day in the sun.

Published in January 2019/reported by Kavita Charanji