Shanthigram Milk Producer Company

If you head down Madurai Main Road and turn off at Idayapatty, you’ll find us in Santhi Gramam. It is a bit of a trek to get out here, but it is where the work happens. We handle milk from the local producers around this part of the district. The facility is at number 300, which isn't hard to spot once you are in the right area. Most of the people working here are from the nearby villages. We start quite early because the milk comes in twice a day, every single day. There’s a lot of cleaning involved. You can't really skip a step when you're dealing with fresh milk. It’s a lot of lifting cans and checking the cooling tanks. Sometimes the power goes out, which causes a bit of a scramble, but we have ways to manage. It's not the kind of job where you sit at a desk. We spend most of the time on our feet on the concrete floors. It gets noisy when the trucks are loading or unloading. We don’t try to be anything we aren’t. It’s just a group of people making sure the milk gets collected and moved to where it needs to go next. The road can get dusty in the summer months. We've been here for a while now, and everyone in the community knows the routine. It is honest work and keeps everyone busy. The cows don't wait for anyone, so we don't either.