Verghese Kurien: the engineer who built India's milk supply chain

An engineer on a bond

Verghese Kurien was born on 26 November 1921 in Kozhikode, Kerala. He went to Michigan State University in the United States on a government scholarship for a master's degree, and in 1949 he returned to India and was posted to a government creamery in Anand, Gujarat.

The posting was part of a bond he had signed in return for the scholarship, and it was not meant to last more than a few years. Instead, Anand became his home for the rest of his working life.

Building the Kaira cooperative

In Anand, farmers had formed the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union in 1946, at the initiative of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation records that it began by combining two village milk societies and a dairy that processed 500 pounds of milk a day. In 1949, at the request of its chairman Tribhuvandas Patel, Kurien joined it.

Tribhuvandas Patel was the organiser of the farmers; Kurien, as manager, gave the administrative and scientific direction. The Bombay government contracted to buy the union's pasteurised milk at stable prices for the Aarey Milk Colony, which supplied the city, and new roads were built so milk could be collected from outlying villages. By 1962 the union had 219 village societies with 46,400 members.

There was a problem every supply chain manager will recognise. Milk production rose in winter, but demand did not. To use the seasonal surplus, the union built a processing plant. It was the first in India to make milk powder, condensed milk and baby food powder, and the first in the world to turn buffalo milk into powder. Its products were sold under the name Amul. In 1973 Kurien brought the district unions together as the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, which markets Amul.

Operation Flood: a national milk grid

In 1965 the government set up the National Dairy Development Board to spread the Anand model across India, with Kurien as its first chairman. NDDB launched Operation Flood in 1970, one of the world's largest rural development programmes.

In its first phase, from 1970 to 1980, Operation Flood linked 18 of India's main milk-producing regions with consumers in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. It was paid for by selling skimmed milk powder and butter oil gifted by the European Economic Community through the World Food Programme. By the end of 1985 there were 43,000 village cooperatives with 4.25 million milk producers, and the third phase, ending in 1996, added thousands more.

NDDB describes the result as a National Milk Grid that links producers with consumers in more than 700 towns and cities, smoothing seasonal and regional price differences while giving farmers fair prices. India became the world's largest milk producer.

Recognition

Kurien received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1963, shared with others, for improving milk supply to Bombay and raising the living standards of village producers. In 1989 he received the World Food Prize, whose citation recognised that feeding people means pairing gains in production with good management and distribution. He was also awarded the Padma Vibhushan. He published his memoir, I Too Had a Dream, in 2005, and died in Nadiad, Gujarat, on 9 September 2012, at the age of 90.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was thinking about the whole chain. Kurien's work joined collection from villages, processing, transport, and sales in cities into one system that the farmers owned.

The second was turning a mismatch into a product. When winter milk outran demand, the answer was processing that could store milk as powder and sell it later.

The third was patient organisation. Village societies, district unions, a state federation and a national board were built one layer at a time, each with a clear job.