Amul Continues Verghese Kurien’s Dairy Legacy
Verghese Kurien reached Anand, Gujarat, in 1949 as a mechanical engineer fulfilling a government assignment. The posting became a career of more than five decades after he joined dairy farmers in Kaira district who were contesting the role of private milk traders. With cooperative leader Tribhuvandas Patel, Kurien supported a system in which producers held a direct stake in collecting, processing and selling milk.
The Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union became associated with the Amul brand and provided the basis for the Anand Model. Its organisation operated through village societies, district milk unions and a state federation. Village bodies collected milk and involved producers; district unions handled processing and manufacturing; the federation managed marketing and distribution.
Kurien worked with dairy technologist H.M. Dalaya on techniques for making milk powder from buffalo milk. The development addressed the livestock and production conditions found in India. The cooperative system also used payments based on tested measures such as fat content, giving farmers a defined basis for procurement transactions.
Kurien’s work gained national backing after Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri visited Anand in 1964. The National Dairy Development Board was created in 1965, with Kurien as its first chairman. Operation Flood began in 1970 and applied the cooperative approach in other parts of India, covering milk collection, processing, distribution and farmers’ access to markets.
Figures cited in the source show India’s milk output rising from about 21.2m tonnes in 1968-69 to more than 55.6m tonnes in 1991-92. During that period, India moved from a milk-deficit position to becoming the world’s largest milk producer. The programme’s institutional model made producers members and owners of the organisations that handled their milk, rather than treating them solely as suppliers of raw material.
The cooperative movement faced resistance from farmers who had distrusted organised procurement, and its development involved institutional and political disagreements. Kurien left the NDDB chairmanship in 1998 after more than 30 years and departed from the chairmanship of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation in 2006. He died in 2012. The federation, which was established in 1973 to market Amul products, continues to operate across categories including milk, butter, ghee, cheese, ice cream and beverages. The Anand Model has also been used as a reference in dairy-development programmes and wider rural value-chain policy.
