KARACHI, May 7: A leading multinational tetra milk producer has arbitrarily raised prices of its half and one-litre packs by Rs5 and Rs10, respectively.

Consumer prices of fresh milk and yogurt were raised by dealers to Rs75 per litre and Rs100 per kg respectively from Rs70 and Rs90, last month.

Karachi Retail Grocers Group (KRGG) General Sec-retary Farid Qureishi said on Monday that Nestle Pakistan jacked up price of Milk Pak one-litre pack to Rs90 from Rs80 and half-litre pack to Rs50 from Rs45.

Like past practice the company did not mention any reason for the price hike. He said in January 2009 the one litre pack was priced at Rs55 per litre which was raised to Rs58 by December 2009. In January 2011, the one litre pack was selling at Rs70 while by November 2011 the one-litre pack was available at Rs80.

Some four years back the city government tried to regulate the pricing of tetra milk but efforts went in vain as the companies argued that tetra milk did not fall within the domain of the city government. In April 2011, another attempt was made which also proved futile.

However, the performance of the city government in controlling price of grocery items including fresh milk had failed to produce any results, leaving the consumers at the mercy of market forces.

Representative of Nestle Pakistan Fakhar Ahmed lin-ked the price hike to rising cost of production on account of surging power rates, transportation cost, increase in price of milk by farmers by 18 per cent in the last five mon-ths, high milk chilling cost, paper and packaging cost etc.

He told Dawn from Lahore that farmers bring milk from villages which was first chilled at 3,000 chilling centres of Nestle and these centres were also run on generators in case of long duration of load shedding.