Uttar Pradesh, the largest state of the Indian Republic, has a population of 207 million people. The state has been receiving all sorts of poultry inputs such as table eggs from South India and broiler chicken and chicks from the neighbouring states of Madhya Pradesh in the south, West Bengal in the east and Haryana in the North.

However, Uttar Pradesh has decided to boost its poultry production under the active encouragement of the chief minister and active administration in the department of animal husbandry over the last three years.

It has initiated schemes to attract poultry production entrepreneurs from other states, which are leading in poultry production and the others interested with in the state.

The government has offered 10 per cent interest subvention to new entrepreneurs who start layer units of 30,000 birds and broiler breeding units of 10,000 birds.

They also offered faster clearances on land acquisition and power supplies to the new units. The state government has advised the banks to lend more money to the new poultry units.

The result is that the daily egg production has already gone up by one million eggs per day, and production of broiler chicks within the state will commence by the second half of the year 2014.

The state government has implemented the rural backyard poultry scheme sponsored by the central government with lot of diligence and three million dual-purpose, multi-coloured, low-input 'Rainbow Rooster' chicks were distributed in 77 districts at 40,000 chicks per district.

These three million chicks must have added at least 1,500 tonnes of chicken and another 1.5 million layer birds on the way to produce eggs in rural households to augmenting the nutritional status of the low-income groups in the state.

Inspired by the progress, neighbouring states like Bihar have also focused their efforts to take advantage of centrally sponsored schemes in poultry production.

The production figures for chicken and eggs in India for the year 2015 now look much better than anticipated.