A flood of memories relating to one of the greatest entrepreneurs of post-independence India rushed through your editor’s mind on November 26, which was half-heartedly celebrated as National Milk Day in memory of the late Dr. Verghese Kurien (1921-2012), promoter-chairman of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd (GCMMF) and the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB). Kurien gifted India with the White Revolution, aka Operation Flood which transformed chronically milk-deficient India into the largest producer of milk worldwide.
In the 1950s, European farmers proposed to dump their heavily subsidised surplus diary produce into India as mercy aid to poor starving Indians. Apprehensive that it would cause farm-gate dairy products prices in this country to crash, Kurien persuaded prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to canalise this butter aid mountain to NDDB. The board cautiously sold these products in urban India to build a capital corpus which was invested in hi-tech dairy milk recombination factories to transform milk into milk powder and vice versa. These factories were purchased on easy terms by farmers’ cooperatives including GCMMF which has developed the Amul brand of butter and dairy products into a national icon.
Inevitably, the fantastic success of Operation Flood didn’t impress the assortment of bolshies, lefties, and communists. In the early 1980s, one Claude Alvares, a freelance journalist of no visible means of support, wrote a lengthy garbled cover story in the Illustrated Weekly of India, then the country’s #1 magazine, denouncing Kurien as a foreign agent with a mission to destroy Indian agriculture. This story prompted loud denunciations of Kurien in Parliament by communist and socialist MPs. But it also prompted your correspondent, then editor of Businessworld, to travel to the Anand (Gujarat), headquarters of NDDB — which Alvares had never visited — to write a 12-page cover story titled ‘Operation Flood: Case for the Defence’. I believe it was this vigorous defence of Kurien which caused the scales to fall from the eyes of the nation’s intelligentsia and acknowledge him as a successful champion of India’s neglected farmers. When comes such another?