Famous Dead Indian - week 4

This is the story of the world’s greatest milkman…

….who was also the first person ever to crowdfund a movie in 1976.

You’ve heard of bloody revolutions. Do you know about the white revolution??

This week’s Famous Dead Indian is Verghese Kurien who made India the world’s largest producer of milk.?

I don’t believe that! No way?

Way! India produces 25% of the world’s milk - 230 million metric tonnes annually, more than the combined output of the US and EU.

Kurien took India from a milk deficient nation to the largest producer of milk in the world. He is one of the greatest social entrepreneurs.

I didn’t know there’s so much milk in India. Tell me, did he grow up on a farm?

No. His life journey is interesting because he wasn’t keen on the dairy sector to begin with.?

He was born on November 26, 1921 in Kerala in South India to a Syrian Christian family. As a young man, he aspired to join the army as an engineer and was even a military cadet and boxer in college. He studied physics in college in present day Chennai. In 1946, he won a government scholarship for a master’s in dairy engineering at the University of Michigan, even though he had no interest in the field.?

The first atom bomb had just been exploded the year before and he saw nuclear physics as an area of tremendous scope. To satisfy the Government of India, he took some token courses in dairy engineering, but what he actually studied was nuclear physics and metallurgy.

I know of someone who turned water into wine…but I’ve never heard of the transition from metals to milk.

Yup, you won’t find that in any alchemy textbook either. Maybe God had a role to fill Kurien’s life with cows when he returned to India in 1949, two years after the country gained independence. Much against his wishes he was assigned to work at a government creamery in Anand (in modern day Gujarat). Here he encountered the local cooperative milk producer’s union in the Kaira district. While we don’t know if he was lactose intolerant, we certainly know that he was allergic to working in the dairy sector and was keen to leave this job and location for good. He was finally convinced by the leader of the cooperative to stay and provide technological support.?

Aha… clearly he didn’t milk any cows, but did he invent some fancy milk-making machine?

Kurien created a new operating model for farmers which came to be known as the “Anand Model”. His genius lay in organising and empowering the farmers to manage their own cooperatives. He designed an operating model to cut out the middleman - milk collection was decentralised and was directly procured from the farmers at villages as a part of the cooperatives.?

Kurien worked on the belief that economic self-interest of all sections of the village-society would make them align together to grow their cooperative and remove caste or class conflicts. By 1952, the daily milk procurement in this cooperative reached 20,000 litres from a mere 200 litres per day in 1948, a 100x growth.?

The cooperative dairying venture that Kurien originally started at ultimately became Amul, which today is India’s biggest dairy brand.?

A social entrepreneur indeed.

Very much so. But his scientific brain wasn’t dormant either.

In 1956, Nestle refused to produce condensed milk using buffalo milk procured locally in India under the reason that the locals won’t be able to handle the technology. Kurien helped develop an indigenous process of making skimmed milk powder and condensed milk from buffalo milk, which had a higher proportion of milk solids. This increased its economic value as in these new forms the milk could travel further in the hot climate of India.?

Speaking of value, is this content AI generated or are you actually creating this content??

I swear on all the holy cows in the world that I am writing this on my own every week. I hope that you are getting value out of it.?

OK, OK…Let’s get back to Kurien and his love of milk

Actually legend has it that Kurien himself didn’t like milk.? But that didn’t stop him from being the architect of India’s White Revolution.?

In 1965, the Prime Minister of India tasked him to replicate the Anand Model nationwide, to promote India’s food security in milk. The National Dairy Development Board was established and Kurien was asked to lead it.

He was the brains behind Operation Flood - the largest dairy development programme in the world. Idea was to replicate the Anand Model in a number of India's major milksheds to “flood” the market with milk. The underlying principle was that the person producing the commodity must profit. By doing so, he revolutionised milk production, made milk more accessible thereby improving health conditions and improved farmer livelihoods. His model has been replicated in other countries.

Kurien’s vision of empowering farmers through cooperatives has had a lasting impact on rural India's economic landscape. He replicated the cooperative model in other agricultural industries like the production of fruits and vegetables, oil seeds and edible oil.

I can see why he expanded the cooperative model to fruits and veggies, but how did he get into the movie business? I don’t know how a milkman becomes a showman?

Kurien was not a showman. He was a lifer in the milk and dairy industry.?

Drawing inspiration from Kurien’s life, Manthan (The Churning) is a 1976 film that is a fictionalised narrative of the genesis of a dairy cooperative movement. Originally, there was no money to make the film.?

Kurien proposed that the milk collection centres deduct two rupees (slightly over 10 cents in 1976 money) from each farmer, enabling all of them to become producers. Over half a million farmers contributed to finance the making of the film. This was the first ever crowdsourced film to be made. The film was shown across the world, including at the UN General Assembly, and won a National Award domestically. Forever the social entrepreneur, Kurien distributed prints of the film to villages nationwide to propagate the milk revolution.?

Amazing story. A true nationbuilder.

Yes. He was awarded some of the highest civilian awards in India like the Padma Shri (1965), the Padma Bhushan (1966), and the Padma Vibhushan (1999). Kurien's work didn't go unnoticed on the international stage either. He received numerous awards, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the World Food Prize and the Wateler Peace Prize.?

Kurien passed away in 2012 at the age of 90. It is said he died a kind of unhappy man at not being awarded India’s highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna.

But in our eyes, if you’re the “Father of the White Revolution” and your birthday is celebrated at “National Milk Day”, you deserve to be a Famous Dead Indian.

If you enjoyed reading this please repost to share with your friends so they can enjoy it too. It costs you nothing but helps raise awareness of these famous high achievers and will inspire everyone. Please leave me any feedback on how I can improve or what you like about this series. Thanks for reading this far.?

This is the fourth profile in the Famous Dead Indian series. Last few weeks, we talked about Dr Vikram Sarabhai, the father of the Indian space programme, Mother Teresa, and Freddie Mercury of the band Queen. You can also find these profiles on my timeline.