They always say what can one man do?
One man can do a lot if
he dedicates himself to the task.
One man can create an AMUL.
– Dr. Verghese
Kurien
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 an 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 organisation that grosses a turnover of over Rs.12, 000 crores in milk
and milk products.
There are few
organisations 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 every day 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, 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
scholarship for higher studies Government of India had laid the condition that
on his return he must serve 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), 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 organisation he had so lovingly built. Political forces
that wanted to clamp their hands on AMUL had cleverly outmaneuvered him. But
even after this unseemly event he did not abandon either Anand or the many
organisations 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 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.
