The Milkman of India

Every morning and every evening, in the villages around Anand in Gujarat, a line of people would form outside a small collection centre. Women in bright saris, old men, children sent by their parents: each carried a pot or a can of milk.

Each person's milk was measured and tested. Each was paid fairly for what they brought, often the same day. For many of these families, it was the first time they had ever been paid fairly for anything.

The man who helped make this possible did not, by his own cheerful admission, even like drinking milk.

The engineer who did not want to come

Verghese Kurien was born on 26 November 1921 in Calicut, in Kerala. His father was a civil surgeon. He studied physics and then engineering in Madras, and was a good student and a keen sportsman.

After India's independence, he won a government scholarship to study in the United States. The government wanted him to study dairy engineering. He was far more interested in metals and machines, and he concentrated on those. But the scholarship came with a condition: when he returned, he had to work for the government for a set period.

In 1949, he was posted to a government creamery in Anand, a dusty small town in the Kaira district of Gujarat. He was unhappy from the day he arrived. He counted the days until he could leave.

The farmers of Kaira

In Kaira, the milk business was controlled by a private dairy company and middlemen. Farmers, many of them poor and owning just one or two buffaloes, had no choice but to sell at whatever price they were offered.

In 1946, encouraged by the freedom leader Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the farmers had gone on strike and formed their own cooperative: the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union. Its leader was a quiet, honest local man named Tribhuvandas Patel.

The young cooperative was struggling. Its equipment kept breaking down. Kurien, bored at the government creamery, began helping them fix their machines.

Tribhuvandas saw something in him. When Kurien's government bond ended and he was free to go, Tribhuvandas asked him to stay a little longer and help them build a proper dairy.

Kurien agreed. He thought it would be for a short time.

Milk powder from buffaloes

The cooperative faced a big problem. In winter, the buffaloes gave plenty of milk, more than the city could buy. In summer, there was too little. Without a way to store the extra milk, farmers lost money.

The answer was to turn surplus milk into milk powder and butter. But experts said buffalo milk could not be made into powder; it was always done with cow's milk.

Kurien and his friend and colleague H. M. Dalaya, a gifted dairy engineer, did not accept this. Dalaya worked out a way to do it. The cooperative's new dairy began producing powder and butter from buffalo milk, and the products were sold under a new name: Amul, short for Anand Milk Union Limited, and an echo of amulya, the Sanskrit word for priceless.

The Anand pattern

What made Anand special was not the machines. It was the idea behind them.

The dairy belonged to the farmers. Each village had its own society, run by the villagers themselves, where anyone with even one buffalo could sell milk. The village societies owned the district union, and the union owned the dairy. The profits went back to the farmers.

In 1964 the Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, came to Anand. He stayed overnight in a village, talking to farmers, and was so impressed that he asked Kurien to help repeat the Anand pattern across the country.

So the National Dairy Development Board was set up in Anand, with Kurien at its head. In 1970 it began a vast programme called Operation Flood, which helped organise dairy farmers into cooperatives in thousands of villages across India.

The man who stayed

Kurien could have had a comfortable career in a big city or abroad. He stayed in Anand with his wife, Molly, and their daughter, Nirmala, for the rest of his life. He was stubborn and outspoken, and he often clashed with officials and politicians. He believed farmers should control their own work, and he fought hard for it.

By the late 1990s, India had become the largest producer of milk in the world. Millions of farming families, with women doing much of the daily work, had a steady income they had never had before.

Verghese Kurien died on 9 September 2012, at the age of ninety. Across India, he is remembered as the father of the White Revolution, and his birthday is celebrated as National Milk Day.

Want to read more?

Dr Kurien's memoir I Too Had a Dream, told to Gouri Salvi, is a frank and often funny account of his life in Anand. The National Dairy Development Board's website describes Operation Flood and the cooperative model.