Dr. Verghese Kurien

Dr.Verghese Kurien celebrated his 90th birthday on 26th November 2011. Kurien had stepped down as the founder chairman of GCMMF in 2006. The doyen of cooperatives, who had also laid the foundation of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) in 1979 and remained its chairman till March 2006, has however continued his moral support to the cooperative movement. Kurien’s work has touched the lives of more than 150 lakh milk producer families across 1.4 lakh villages of the country in almost all states. Similarly, the products made from 300 lakh litres of milk procured everyday by all state federations are reaching crores of consumers in the country. Interestingly, this year also marks the completion of 60 years ever since Kurien formally joined Amul Dairy. Born in a Syrian Christian family in Calicut, Kerala, on November 26, 1921, Kurien’s uncle John Mathai was an economist who served as India’s first railway minister and subsequently as the finance minister. Kurien is the architect of Operation Flood — the largest dairy development programme in the world that he had taken up as chairman of National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) where he served for 33 years between 1965 and 1998. Kurien graduated in physics from Loyola College, Madras, in 1940, and then did his BE (mechanical) from University of Madras. After that he joined the Tata Steel Technical Institute in Jamshedpur from where he graduated in 1946. He then went to US on a government scholarship to earn his master of science in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University. On returning to India, he was posted as a dairy engineer at the government creamery, Anand, in May 1949. It was around the same period that Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers Union Limited (KDCMPUL), now famous as Amul Dairy under chairmanship of Tribhuvandas Patel and inspired by India’s Iron Man Sardar Patel, was fighting a battle with privately-owned Polson Dairy. It was on Patel’s insistence that young Kurien volunteered to help KDCMPUL set up a processing plant. This marked the birth of Amul. The Amul pattern of cooperatives later became so successful that in 1965 the then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri created NDDB to replicate Amul model across the country with Kurien as its chairman. In July 1970, NDDB officially launched ‘Operation Flood’ — ‘the billion-litre idea’ aimed at taking India’s dairy industry from a drop to a flood. A 1998 World Bank report on the impact of dairy development in India revealed that of the Rs 200 crore that the World Bank invested in three phases of Operation Flood, the net return into India’s rural economy was a massive Rs 24,000 crore each year over a period of 10 years. Kurien is a recipient of the World Food Prize, Merit d’ Agricole from the Government of France, Padma Shree, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan besides many other awards and honorary degrees.