I Too Had a Dream

4 ideas

1. Kaira farmers' milk strike against Polson

   In 1946 dairy farmers in Kaira district, Gujarat, were forced to sell milk cheaply to middlemen and to Polson Dairy, which held the contract to supply the Bombay Milk Scheme. Led by Tribhuvandas Patel and advised by Sardar Patel, they refused to sell to Polson for about two weeks and formed their own cooperative union at Anand, which won the Bombay supply. Kurien, a government engineer posted to the Anand creamery in 1949, stayed on to build that union into Amul.

2. Anand pattern three-tier producer ownership

   Village cooperative societies collect and test milk. District unions process and market it. A state federation handles the brand and distribution. At every tier the farmers own and elect the board, and that board hires professional managers who answer to them. This joins the scale and expertise of a corporation to the ownership of the producers, so that margins go back to the farmers instead of to intermediaries.

3. Transparent fair payment builds producer trust

   This made the price visible, fast, and hard to cheat. Kurien argues that this procurement practice, more than technology or capital, is what earned the loyalty of illiterate smallholders who had been exploited by middlemen for generations.

4. Operation Flood turned food aid into capital

   Starting in 1970, India's National Dairy Development Board took skim milk powder and butter oil donated by the European Economic Community. Instead of distributing it free, which would have undercut local farmers, it recombined the donations into milk and sold them in major cities. The proceeds financed Anand-pattern cooperatives, chilling plants, and a national milk grid, and the programme helped make India the world's largest milk producer.

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