Verghese Kurien

In 1949, Kurien was sent by the government of India to its run-down, experimental creamery at Anand, Bombay province (later Bombay state and now part of Gujarat state since 1960) to serve five years as an officer in the dairy division.[18] He spent time going to Bombay city on weekends and under the pretext of work, volunteered to tinker with the primitive dairy equipment of Tribhuvandas Patel, who sought his help to process the milk of farmers he had brought together after a strike in 1946, and formed a cooperative to purchase their milk at nearby Kaira (now Kheda).

Kurien decided to quit the government job mid-way and leave Anand but was persuaded by Patel to stay with him after quitting them, and help him set up his dairy cooperative.[27][28] Kurien established the dairy cooperative, Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union Limited (KDCMPUL) (popularly known as Amul - Anand Milk Utpadak Ltd Dairy), at Anand, in the year 1950.[29]

The farmers faced a problem of fluctuating milk production as surplus milk found no buyers in the flush season (when animals produce more milk) and turned to the cooperative for help, where a proposal to convert the surplus into milk powder was made. Kurien's batchmate from America and dairy engineer H. M. Dalaya, who he persuaded to stay back at Anand after a visit, invented the process of making skim milk powder and condensed milk from buffalo milk instead of from cow milk.[10][11] In India, buffalo milk was plentiful, while cow milk was in short supply, unlike Europe. For this reason, Amul competed successfully against Nestle, the leading competitor for milk, and later against Glaxo for baby food. Later research by Dr. G. H. Wilster led to cheese production from buffalo milk at Amul.[30] To cut costs, Kurien procured a captive packaging-tin unit attached to the dairy facility.

Amul organised dairy farmers in the villages and linked them directly to consumers in the market by eliminating middlemen, ensuring a steady and a regular income for them even during the lean season, and better quality products at a competitive price to consumers in the large market of the reachable Bombay city, over well-paved village "milk roads" and "cold-chains".

Kurien and his mentor Patel were backed by some political leaders and bureaucrats[lower-alpha 1] who saw merit in their pioneering cooperative model: farmers willing to associate together for produce and willing to be led by professionals while being owners of the cooperative. India had just gained political freedom from a colonial power whom the leaders had seen extorting land tax unjustly from farmers suffering from crop failure. There had been many famines over the duration of that regime, so leaders were concerned over food security of the population. As a newly independent nation, there was a desire to gain self-sufficiency in its consumed produce and a thrust towards domestic production to substitute for imports. Moreover, these nationalist leaders were influenced by socialist ideals of formation of social capital more than the formation of capital assets, and the Gandhian philosophy of production by the masses triumphed mass-production in a resource-constrained nation. At the same time, the new government's policies were open to the skills and learnings of modern experts, research, technological prowess, and aid from the rest of the world.

The first farmers in the cooperative all belonged to Patel's predominant caste-grouping, which helped to bring all of them together quickly before farmers from other castes became interested and participated. Rather than focusing directly on removing caste and class conflicts which get entrenched as vested interests, Patel worked singularly on the belief that economic self-interest of all sections of the village-society would make them align together to grow their cooperative.[31]

Amul's cooperative dairying venture became popular. Dignitaries, researchers, trainees,[32] and common folk would visit Anand to learn more about it. Earlier, former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had visited Anand to inaugurate Amul's plant, the largest in Asia, and praised Kurien for his groundbreaking work.[33]

In 1956, Kurien visited Nestle in Switzerland at the invitation of the commerce and industries minister, to ask them to reduce imports of Indian production and have more Indians inducted, but they told him that making condensed milk "could not be left to the natives". He returned to India and boosted Amul's production and market of condensed milk; after two years the government banned the import of condensed milk into the country. Amul also faced serious competition from imported butter, especially from New Zealand. Nehru, who trusted Kurien, cut imports of butter in tandem, with Kurien promising and delivering an incremental increase of his production to eliminate butter shortage.[34] During the 1962 Indo-China war, the government relied on Kurien to provide supplies to the army. He had to divert these away from his civilian market. When Polson started grabbing his market share, Kurien ensured the government froze Polson's production lines, as part of the war effort.[35]

Verghese Kurien seen here with 6th Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi and second Prime Minister of India Lal Bahadur Shastri.

In 1965, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri tasked Kurien to replicate the dairy's Anand scheme nationwide for which, the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) was founded under Kurien on his conditions, that it be independent of governmental control and that it be set up at Anand, away from the capitals and closer to farmers.[36] Kurien was mindful of meddling by the political class and bureaucrats sitting in the capital cities, letting it be known upfront.[37]

He was negotiated with donors like the UNICEF for aid[38] and confronted the New Zealand government and a lobbies in countries which he realised wanted to "convert aid into trade" for their companies, contrary to his ideal of India becoming self-sufficient. He used the proceeds from the sale of that "mountains and lakes"[lower-alpha 2] of dumped aid in the Indian markets as his "billion-litre idea" to encourage the movement of high-yield native cattle to urban areas and set up milksheds and dairy farms nationwide to stabilise the dairy markets of big cities.[39][40][41]

The Anand dairy was replicated in Gujarat's districts around it and he set brought all of them under Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. (GCMMF)[2] in 1973 to sell their products under a single Amul brand. Many states emulated setting up their federations based on this scheme with varying degrees of success, notably, with Karnataka's brand Nandini, Rajasthan's brand Saras and Bihar's brand Sudha.

Shastri also took Kurien's help to manage the Delhi Milk Scheme; Kurien swiftly corrected prices.

In 1979, he founded the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA)[18] to groom managers for the cooperatives.

Kurien was inspired by prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi's methods on setting up cooperatives and plants, Indira's intervention in fruits and vegetables, and Rajiv's intervention in oilseeds and edible oil markets.[12] Brands resulting from these – Dhara (Operation Golden Flow for cooking oils), Mother Dairy (Operation Flood) and Safal (for vegetables) have become common household names.

Kurien was crucial in setting up similar cooperatives across India and beyond. In 1979, Premier Alexei Kosygin invited Kurien to the Soviet Union for advice on its cooperatives. In 1982, Pakistan invited him to set up dairy cooperatives, where he led a World Bank mission. Around 1989, China implemented its own Operation Flood-like programme with the help of Kurien and the World Food Programme. Former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao sought his help to set up a dairy cooperative in neighbouring Sri Lanka which was done as a collaboration with NDDB later in 1997.

In the 1990s he lobbied and fought hard to keep multinational companies from entering the dairy business even as the country opened up all its other markets to them after decades of protection.[42] India became the world's largest milk producer by 1998, surpassing the United States of America,[43] with about 17 percent of global output in 2010–2011.

In 1998, he persuaded former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to appoint Dr. Amrita Patel as his successor at NDDB, whom he had groomed under him to keep government bureaucrats away from the post and protect NDDB's independence from the government.[44] Later, he had differences with her on the direction she was taking cooperative dairying—by solely focusing on production and yield targets through corporatisation and competition at the expense of weakening the cooperative institutions of the country.[45] For instance, marketing no longer remaining with the farmers' cooperatives and being handed over to private or corporate interests, as that would mean foregoing the ability to determine the price to be paid by consumers, the quality of the produce to be offered to them, and losing the "lion's share" of the money paid by the consumer to these corporates.

He resigned from the position of GCMMF Chairman in 2006 after dwindling support from new members on the governing board and mounting dissent from his protegés (some referring to his work ethic as dictatorial) backed by political forces desperate to make inroads into the cooperative dairy's district unions.[46][47]

He was handed over the chairmanship of Tribhuvandas Foundation – an NGO to work on women and child health in Kheda district, by Tribhuvandas Patel, as the trust started to grow rapidly after receiving foreign grants.[29]

Control over the Amul group GCMMF has been constantly disputed in court.[48]