LPT 311: Milk and Milk Products Technology (1+1)

INDIA’S DAIRY COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT

• The historical co-operative movement starts as early as 1946 in Anand, a small town in the state of Gujarat in western India. The exploitative trade practices followed by the local trade cartel like Polson and others triggered off the cooperative movement. Anguished by unfair and manipulative practices followed by the trade, the farmers of the district approached the great Indian patriot Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel for a solution. He advised them to get rid of middlemen and form their own co-operative, which would have procurement, processing and marketing under their control.
  In 1946, the farmers of this area went on a milk strike refusing to be cowed down by the cartel. Under the inspiration of Sardar Patel, and the guidance of leaders like Morarji Desai and Tribhuvandas Patel, they formed their own cooperative in 1946.
• Subsequently Dr. Verghese Kurien, the World Food Prize and the Magsaysay Award winner, is the architect of India’s White Revolution, which helped India emerge as the largest milk producer in the world.
• Impressed with the development of dairy cooperatives in Kaira District & its success, Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minister of India during his visit to Anand in 1964, asked Dr. V Kurien to replicate the Anand type dairy cooperatives all over India. Thus, the National Dairy Developed Board was formed and Operation Flood Programme was launched for replication of the Amul Model all over India.
• Operation Flood, the world’s largest dairy development programme, is based on the experience gained from the ‘Amul Model’ dairy cooperatives (The Amul Model of dairy development is a three-tiered structure with the dairy cooperative societies at the village level federated under a milk union at the district level and a federation of member unions at the state level). The facilities at all levels are entirely farmer-owned. The cooperatives are able to build markets, supply inputs and create value-added processing. Thus, Amul Model cooperatives seem to be the most appropriate organizational force for promoting agricultural development using modern technologies and professional management and thereby generating employment for the rural masses and eradicating poverty in these undeveloped areas. India has already demonstrated the superiority of this approach.