Years ago, I have travelled widely in the
state of Gujarat. Anand town is on the State Highway between Baroda and
Ahmedabad. It has a sleepy railway station on the Mumbai - Ahmedabad line. As
you travel on the state highway you can see factories bearing sky-high legend
AMUL. Whenever I used to travel on the route, my mind would inescapably
remember Dr. Verghese Kurien. I had always regarded him as one of my ideals. I
could never think of him without a sense of admiration. I had always longed to
go into his office to meet him and shake hands at least once. The thought of
‘who am I for that?’ curbed my ambition.
Dr.Verghese Kurien was the one, over the last 63 years, who
had built brick by brick the AMUL brand that is the face of the internationally
famous, commercially successful empire that markets milk and milk products. The
story goes back to the small town of Anand. AMUL stands for Anand Milk Union
Limited. It is the name that showed the world how a single person with a will
can eradicate the poverty of millions of people with a product that spoils in a
matter of a few hours! It is a name that showed how the destiny of a nation can
be rewritten for the better. Dr.Verghese Kurien is the only Indian who showed
how it could be done!
Dr.Kurien was never the owner of or the investor in AMUL.
AMUL is a miracle that happened when, as a Government employee, Dr.Kurien came
forward to be a social entrepreneur. AMUL is among the most massive of the
cooperative unions of people! It is a union of 16200 village cooperative units.
Common people, all 32 lakhs of them, are the owners of AMUL! Today AMUL stands
before the whole world as its greatest cooperative organization that grosses a
turnover of over Rs.12, 000 crores in milk and milk products.
There are few organizations in the world that can stand in
comparison with AMUL in manufacturing breadth of products like our daily milk,
butter, milk supplement for children, cheese, skimmed milk powder, curd, milk
butter, ice cream, cold milk drinks, milk-based health drinks, sweetened milk
concentrates, milk sweets, etc or in its geographic spread or its scale of
operation. Dr.Kurien, as the head of National Dairy Development Board, launched
Operation Flood to replicate the AMUL pattern of cooperative dairy development
all over India. It is this ‘Operation Flood’ that made India the largest
producer of liquid milk in the world! It is one of the few reasons that India
could stand tall in the world as an example to the other nations! Dr.Kurien
achieved all these as a Government employee on a monthly salary, taking all the
monumental works in his stride as if it is all part of his everyday work!
Variously called as the Father of India’s White Revolution,
India’s Milkman, and other such endearing names, Dr.Kurien had Malayalam as his
mother tongue. He was born in 1921, as the scion of a rich family, in
Kozhikkode, a part of Madras province in the pre-Independence India. He
graduated in Physics from Loyola College of Chennai and later took a degree in
Mechanical Engineering from Madras University. Later when he topped the exam in
Metallurgy at Tata Steel’s College of Technology in Jamshedpur, the Government
of India sent him to America for further studies with a scholarship grant. He
joined Michigan State University in 1946 and returned to India as a Mechanical
Engineering scientist. He was to later remark that none of these achievements
of him in higher studies was of any use in his later career!
While granting him a scholarship for higher studies
Government of India had laid the condition that on his return he must serve the
Government of India for a few years wherever he is posted in India. That was
how he reached Anand in 1949. Anand was then direly impoverished with scorching
summer and water famine and without any basic facilities. Dr.Kurien was sent there
to erect new machinery for the Government milk dairy. Born with a silver spoon
and having lived in America cocooned in all comforts, was given a dilapidated
garage to stay in Anand. He could not stand the sounds and smells of cows and
buffaloes tethered all around. He had an aversion for milk even as a child!
Seeing no way out, he waited for his agreed term with Government to be over. In
the meanwhile, he kept sending his resignations. Finally, his resignation was
accepted before the agreed term expired! As he was packing his bags with great
relief, Tribhuvandas Patel, a leader of farmers in Gujarat, called on him.
Tribhuvandas Patel conveyed his belief forcefully that he
could do something good for the dire poor who toiled night and day and yet
could not eke out a living. He told him that Gujarat needed his service and
exhorted him to stay. Dr.Kurien could not overlook the gravity and force of the
request made by Tribhuvandas. That day he staked his life for the poor farmers
of Gujarat. Thus, the legend of Tribhuvandas and Verghese was born and the rest
is the history of India’s White Revolution.
In one of his reminiscences down the road many years later
Dr.Kurien had said: “Till then I knew nothing of either milk or agriculture.
Only those people who are conscious of what they do not know rather than what
they know can execute their work properly.” He requested his friend from his
American stay, Harischandra Yadav, to come down to Anand for a few days. He
hailed from a dairy farming family. The friend who came as a guest for three
days stayed on for 35 years shouldering important responsibilities in AMUL.
Dr.Kurien brought together many able persons from different fields and led them
with a great clarity of purpose.
Dr.Kurien was not well versed in Gujarati language. His
Hindi too was a laboured effort. English was his lingua franca. But that never
cramped his style. Dr.Kurien’s contributions to the widely noticed and timely
creative advertisements of AMUL were direct. Dr.Kurien’s stay at AMUL was
a saga of achievements and awards after awards sought him out. Government of
India conferred on him every honour it had except Bharat Ratna award. The award
for being the World’s Top Manager (1993), the highest award of the Milk
Industry in the world, Walter Peace Prize, World Food Award, and Magsaysay
Award, he had got them all. In many of these awards, he was the only Indian to
get them.
When his time of retirement came, he was not allowed to
retire. He too was not the retiring kind. But at the ripe age of 85,
Dr.Verghese Kurien was rather forcefully shown the gate at AMUL, the
organization he had so lovingly built. Political forces that wanted to clamp
their hands on AMUL had cleverly outmanoeuvred him. But even after this
unseemly event, he did not abandon either Anand or the many organizations that
he had founded like the world-famous National Institute of Rural Development.
Selfishness was not a part of his mental vocabulary, but
Dr.Verghese Kurien was supremely confident of himself, his work, and the decisions
he made to further the cause of farmers. For this, he was accused of being
head-strong! He had always wanted all the Divisional Heads in AMUL to report to
him directly so that he could guide them better. For this, he was dubbed a
dictator. But never in his life was he a partisan giving concessions to
favourites or recommending an individual. His work ethics, moving ahead of
times with foresight, impartial and unbiased evaluation and unbending
determination for the cause were the basis of his management legitimacy. The
Presidents and Prime Ministers of India and Dignitaries from abroad threw
protocol to the wind and visited him in Anand to gain the insights of his
problem-solving philosophy.
This is what he has written in his autobiography An
Unfinished Dream: “Farmer sheds his blood as sweat to produce food for us. When
he eats his meal in peace, when he gets the respect and an income equivalent to
other trades and industries, then alone will my dream be fulfilled. The journey
that I started in Anand 60 years ago is not going to end till every poor farmer
in our country triumphs.”
Dr.Verghese Kurien, who was a complete atheist and
rationalist, wanted his body to be cremated in an electric crematorium and the
ashes to be strewn on the soil of Anand. He also insisted that his funeral be
free of the usual rites and that there be no memorial to his name. His wish was
implicitly carried out after his death on 9th September 2012.
Dr.Kurien used to cite the following lines of Alfred Lord
Tennyson whenever he talked of his own death
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea….
2012
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