Bring me men to match my mountains, Bring me men to match my plains,
Men with empires in their purpose, And new eras in their brains.
-- Sam Walter Foss, from "The Coming American", July 4, 1894
Y K Alagh, former member of planning commission and a long time associate of Verghese Kurien, has an interesting anecdote to share if you ask him how Kurien was different form the several intellectuals India has produced.
“Once Kurien told me, ‘You are a friend and you are very good but you are much too general Yoginder – you don’t concentrate on one thing.’”
To which Alagh replied, “I know, you are a Spartan and I am an Athenian! I think.”
While both Spartans and Athenians belonged to Greece, Spartans were a militaristic race, which believed in expanding their area of control and preferred the rule of few (or even one) over many. Athenians, on the other hand, were a more democratic lot.
As a person, Kurien was a man in hurry. He had a vision and he was out to achieve it. He laid a lot of stress on covering the last mile. As such, he was known to start in the reverse order when planning for a new venture like introducing a range of cheese.
He was very hands on with everything he did. In fact, once when a crane went out of control, Kurien flung himself and avoided any mishap. He did not care that in doing so he actually cut his thigh and bled profusely.
“That typified the man,” recalls Alagh.
The Kurien Doctrine
Kurien’s main emphasis was on improving the marketing opportunities for the Indian farmer without which the farmers were dependent on middlemen, who cornered most of the profits and stunted the growth of rural India.
Therefore, he not only worked hard in creating the best marketing platform for farmers himself, he also founded the Institute of Rural Management at Anand (IRMA) in 1979 to create a cadre of professional managers imbued with his understanding of the rural India.
Many young professionals like Sanjiv Phansalkar, Program Leader at the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, started his career from IRMA just to be associated with Kurien.
“The simplicity and power in his argument that unless you put the means of production in the hands of the producer you cannot change their fate was simply great,” says Phansalkar who joined IRMA in 1982.
Ironically, it is this very thought that was questioned towards the fag end of Kurien’s career when there was a push to delinking production and marketing functions of the co-operatives.
His protégé, Amrita Patel, who succeeded him as the Chairman of NDDB in 1998 was spearheading the move to turn co-operative to producer companies and hiving off marketing side of business into separate entities.
Kurien bitterly opposed the move as he feared the private players like Nestle and Britannia will eventually take over the marketing yet again. In a sense, he felt his life’s work was being destroyed.
But the relative weakness of the cooperative movement in other parts of the country as well as the newer trends of business management only underline the fact that the success of Kurien’s model in Gujarat was both a product of his own leadership as well as the existing economic climate in the country.
Another episode when he found himself swimming against the tide was in the late 1990s when there was a growing demand to amend the Milk and Milk Products Order (or MMPO), which regulated the milk processing business in the country. As the head of NDDB, Kurien had restricted the milk processing business to the existing co-operatives. The Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), which he headed, and its brand Amul benefitted hugely from such a restriction. But it was an untenable stand in an increasingly liberalized economy were many private players who wanted to enter the business.
Ultimately, after prolonged deliberations the NDA government diluted the MMPO in 2000. Experts who were close to the deliberations believe it helped increasing the productivity by 5% to 10%.
A Reluctant Start
In her book, “The Amul India Story,” Ruth Heredia states that Verghese Kurien was actually quite an “unlikely recruit” in the field of dairying.
It was 1945 and the Second World War had just ended. The government in India approved 500 new scholarships in UK and US for young Indian professionals who would be required in the post war reconstruction.
24 years old Verghese Kurien, a mechanical engineer from Madras University had barely completed a year of apprenticeship with the Jamshedpur based TISCO (Tata Iron and Steel Company). But he wasn’t enjoying his time there.
As he sat before the interview board, he was hoping to get an opportunity to study metallurgy.
“What is pasteurization?”
A surprised Kurien gave a half-baked reply, “A process of boiling milk at a certain temperature.”
“Thank you,” said the interviewer. “You have been selected for ‘Dairy Engineering’”
Reluctantly, Kurien said yes since it was the only scholarship left available by then and went on to complete his Masters from Michigan State University.
However, no one could have imagined how this odd event would shape the future of millions of farmers in Independent India.
Upon his return to India, Kurien was sent to a remote district of Gujarat to help a milk co-operative under instructions of Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, India’s first Home Minister.
The little known town, Anand in the Kaira district, did not hold a lot of promise for the young and impatient Kurien. But at the last moment, he was persuaded to stay back by the founder of Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers Union Ltd., Tribhuvandas Patel, a tall leader in his own right. After this there was no turning back for Kurien.
He dedicated himself to the task of strengthening the co-operative and relieving the milk farmers from the clutches of intermediaries. It was not an easy task. India had just gained independence and there was a natural suspicion surrounding anything that resembled the colonial rule. Moreover, there were deep-set caste divisions and gender biases that Kurien and his team had to deal with. Not to mention the resentment among the existing middlemen who tried everything in their power to derail the nascent efforts.
“It was nothing short of a miracle,” says Shreyans Shah, editor and publisher of Gujarat Samachar
By 1955, Kurien led to the development of the iconic Amul brand for selling the milk of the co-operative. In 1965, Kurien’s leadership caught the attention of the Prime Minister Lal Bhadur Shashtri, who was great sympathizer of the farmers. He asked Kurien to lead the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) and replicate the Co-operative success story of Amul across the country. In 1970, with the help of the World Bank, the NDDB started “Operation Flood” which, over the next 26 years, transformed India from a milk importer to world’s top most milk producing country.
Kurien came to be known as the “Milkman of India” and the “Father of White Revolution” apart from being awarded the Magsaysay Prize (1963), Padam Shri (1965), Padma Bhushan (1966), Wateler Peace Prize (1986) and the World Food Prize (1989).
Today close to 14 million farmers are organized in over 133000 village co-operatives and produce over 25 million litres of milk everyday. Milk production in India has risen from just under 21 million tonnes annually in 1970 to 117 million tonnes in 2010. In comparison China’s production could only rise from 2 mn tonnes to 41 mn tonnes over the same period.
Veteran filmmaker, Shyam Benegal, regards Kurien, along with M S Swaminathan (father of India’s Green Revolution), as the two greatest heroes of independent India. Benegal directed the Oscar nominated movie on the rise of milk co-operative movement from Gujarat.
“His work was charged with idealism and he completely changed the economics of milk production in the country,” says Benegal.
Source: http://forbesindia.com/article/special/v-kurien-indias-white-knight/33719/1
Read more: http://forbesindia.com/article/special/v-kurien-indias-white-knight/33719/1#ixzz26XVoHaUp
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