By Yashi Jain
26 November 2017 marked yet another year that India celebrated National Milk Day by commemorating the man who brought Anand to a lot of farmers and every citizen of India through his brand: Amul. Dr Verghese Kurien who would have turned 96 this year, was able to gift this country the utterly butterly delicious taste of milk and the confidence that one man can bring about a revolution. Through his life and works, a milk deficit country saw the rise of this revolutionary as its saviour.
The birth of the revolution in Anand
In 1946, farmers from a village named Anand were having problems dealing with the exploitative nature of the local traders and decided to start a cooperative movement. This movement was inspired by the Indian Freedom Struggle and made milk its symbol and stood to protest against the atrocities of Palson Dairy, a local dairy that used to buy milk from farmers at a very low cost and sell them in the Bombay market at a high price to accrue greater profit margins.
The Milk Man of India had arrived at Anand in 1949 to manage a dairy. Displeased by his tedious and unchallenging job, he was about to leave the village when he was forced by his friend to stay back to overlook the installation of new machinery in the village. It was then, that he got an insight into the prevailing wrongdoings transpired by power in power and decided to help farmers come out of this misery by bringing the cooperative system in full force, making it an impenetrable entity. He changed the face of Anand, transforming it into a model village, the success of which was to be replicated in other parts of the nation. He spearheaded Operation Flood, an initiative started to make India one of the largest producers of milk.
The spark for ‘Floods’ of change
One man turned the tables and India, a net importer of milk soon became one of the largest exporters of milk through the establishment of Amul. It empowered not only men but also women through the cooperative movement and brought together the country in the belief that through honesty and hard work one can not only change lives of families but also change the face of things at large. A person who did not enjoy drinking milk himself, sold it to the world.
Dr Kurien’s success lies in a lot of factors and today’s generation can learn a lesson or two from the way he did business. He believed and invested in technology and thought of solutions that were locally relevant. He believed in the power of the community and that development could be brought about by vesting people with the instruments of development. The power of Amul was that it changed with time and constantly evolved while sticking to its roots which is why even today every generation enjoys the products of the brand. His motives included helping the farmers bring about change, deemphasising the greed for revenue, the pinnacle of selflessness wherein Amul was born. He was able to turn around the country’s economic struggle and bring about development at the grass root level.
A milkman’s unconventionality
Despite his unconventional ways, the milkman was quite a businessman at heart who knew that to be successful one had to constantly change, while still being a customer-driven entity. The nose less girl with a polka dotted dress and catchy phrases on current issues on billboards across the nation was an advertising campaign that the world had never seen before. His innovation and motivation to make Amul constantly grow shows in his range of products, making Amul India’s largest food brand.
With a very modest and an almost forced beginning, today, 65 years later, 16,100 cooperatives are part of Amul with 3.20 million milk producers producing millions of tonnes of milk every day and over 2 billion people consuming Amul products, celebrating the man behind the initiative is only natural.
Just like a mother struggles to feed her little child a glass of milk and then finally manages to do so, enriching the child’s health, India’s Milkman managed to fight the odds to feed Indians milk and enrich the country with health, wealth and pride. Today, we must be inspired by the struggle of this one man whose dedication work was no less than that of an unfettered mother fighting for the rights of her child.
Featured Image Credits: u m a m i on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC
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