AMUL - "Father of the white Revolution"

Dr. Verghese Kurien is called the "father of the white revolution" in India. He is credited with architecting Operation Flood -- the largest dairy development program in the world. Verghese Kurien, set up the Anand model of cooperative dairy development, engineered the White Revolution in India, and made India the largest milk producer in the world. Born on 26th November 1921, Dr.Kurien graduated with Physics from Loyola College, Madras in 1940 and then did B.E.(Mech) from the Madras University. After passing out of the University, he joined the Tata Steel Technical Institute, Jamshedpur from where he graduated in 1946. He then went to USA on a government scholarship to do his Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan State University. When he came back to India, he was posted as a Dairy Engineer at the government creamery, Anand, in May 1949. Around the same time, the infant cooperative dairy, Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union Limited (KDCMPUL), -- now famous as AMUL -- was fighting a battle with the Polson Dairy which was privately owned. Young Kurien, fed up with being at the government creamery which held no challenge, volunteered to help Shri Tribhuvandas Patel, the Chairman of KDCMPUL, to set up a processing plant. This marked the birth of AMUL and the rest is history. The first Amul cooperative was the result of a farmers' meeting in Samarkha (Kaira district, Gujarat) on 4th January 1946, called by Morarji Desai under the advice of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, to fight rapacious milk contractors. It was Sardar's vision to organise farmers, to have them gain control over production, procurement and marketing by entrusting the task of managing these to qualified professionals, thereby eliminating the middle men, the bane in farmers' prosperity.