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MS Swaminathan: architect of Green Revolution; the greatest Indian since Gandhi
Posted on October 6th, 2023
On the occasion of India’s 65th anniversary of Independence, television channels CNN-IBN (now CNN News18), History Channel, and Outlook magazine jointly ran an audience poll, steered by a panel of “experts”, to ascertain the ‘Greatest Indian after Gandhi’.
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, who passed on at the age of 98 on September 28, 2023, barely made it to a shortlist of 50, let alone the Top 10 that contained Sachin Tendulkar and Lata Mangeshkar in a club overwhelmingly comprising politicians.
Such lists are gimmicks anyway and a result of political partisanship, recency bias and media narratives.
In this writer’s view, with no disrespect to those of yours, there isn’t anyone more worthy of the tag ‘greatest Indian since Independence’ than Dr MS Swaminathan. He provided the bedrock of science and built institutions up from scratch with scant resources to usher in the Green Revolution. His contributions made India not just food self-sufficient, helped 800 million poor escape hunger, but also turned it into a leading producer of every major agricultural commodity.
Faith and food
Swaminathan can be seen as the male embodiment of Annapoorna, a form of Parvati, the Hindu deity of food and nourishment, holding in one hand a Leitz binocular research microscope and his field notes in another, instead of the pot and ladle filled with food in popular religious iconography.
That both the Goddess of nourishment and Swaminathan, the scientific guarantor of food security, are now relegated in public consciousness are a measure of India’s progress and the liberty we now have to take access to food for granted.
Hungry nation
To understand the importance of Swaminathan’s work, it is instructive to survey the first twenty five years of Independent India’s history.
By 1962, India was a basket case; the doomsayer’s dream come true; a nation humiliated on the battlefield and stripped of its self-esteem, living on Western food-aid.
During the disastrous war with China in 1962, Prime Minister Nehru’s letter to US President John F Kennedy seeking help to ensure the very “survival of India ” wasn’t forwarded for a week because of its “naked desperation”. In any case the US didn’t respond because it was preoccupied with the Soviet Union planning to deploy nuclear missiles closer home in Cuba.
The Bengal famine of 1943 which starved 3.5 million Indians to death had a profound impact not just on the freedom movement but also in the politics and the policy course of free India.
“After decades of marches, boycotts, and strikes in protest of the economic consequences of imperial rule, the Bengal famine marked, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s words, ‘the final judgement on British rule in India.’ As India’s citizens and politicians reflected upon the famine, they saw in it the clearest failure of colonial politics and economics, tying the promise of self- rule to the project of sustenance for every Indian. Famine had long been central to Indian understandings of imperial injustice, but after 1943, the elimination of hunger emerged as a nationalist imperative,” writes Benjamin Seigel, a Boston University historian of politics, agriculture, and the environment, in his 2018 book Hungry Nation.
Farm versus factory
But stagnant agriculture and a crippled industry meant the python-grip of hunger only got tighter in the two decades post-Independence.
The economic model India pursued under Nehru’s leadership involved top-down industrialization. The government through the companies it owned would make steel, electricity and the heavy machinery needed to create ‘New India’. The only way to fund all of this was to suck agriculture dry. Nearly 90% of the country’s population was agrarian and farming drove most of the economic activity.
“Borrowing large sums from abroad was out of the question—India didn’t have the stores of foreign exchange that would be necessary to repay the loans. Funds for industrialization therefore had to come from India itself. Creating an industrial economy thus implied skimming off the profits from rural peasants and using that money to build steel mills, power plants, and highways in urban areas. Like [Mahatma] Gandhi, Nehru was sympathetic to the plight of poor farmers. Nonetheless, his ideas about development unavoidably led him to drain the agricultural countryside to benefit the industrial cities,” writes Charles Mann, a US journalist and science writer in his book The Wizard and The Prophet that looks at the lives of scientists Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, the greatest 20th century influences on agricultural science and environmentalism respectively.
Begging bowl
This policy resulted in abject underinvestment in agriculture. The government-led heavy industry plan too was built on a shaky foundation in the absence of a small and medium industrial base of private entrepreneurship.
As early as 1950, India had to approach the US for 2 million tonnes of grain in desperate food aid. The request was a significant turning point not just for India. The US realized the power of such aid. It was soon packaged as the ‘food for peace’ programme– a potent Cold War weapon to prevent newly independent countries such as India joining the Soviet camp.
In 1954, US passed a law popularly known as PL480 that allowed the American government to dispose its surplus grain abroad at highly subsidized rates.
Hot meal in Cold War
In one stroke, the US could get rid of surplus food and keep domestic farm prices stable, while using the excess as part of the global policy to contain communism. Between 1956 when India signed a deal with the US under the PL 480 plan, up to 1970, it received nearly 65 million tonnes of cheap wheat (almost half of India’s current annual production). India paid for PL 480 grain in rupees, held by the American government in India. The money was to be spent in the country in the form of development investments. By the 1970, it is estimated that PL 480 payments gave the US control of as much as one-third of India’s total money supply.
“It was almost as if the Americans had bought a big piece of India with grain,” wrote John F Perkins, a scientist and historian in the book Geopolitics and the Green Revolution.
The addiction to cheap American wheat was so big and the incentive to increase domestic farm production so little that the average wheat yields of about 700-900 kg per hectare until 1965 was no different from the time of the Mughal empire in the 16th century.
Cheap imported wheat allowed the government to open a bread-making business under the brand Modern Foods (now owned by Unilever India) to keep up with urban food demand.
Today, India is among the world’s largest producers of every major agricultural commodity including rice, wheat, cotton, sugar and fruits and vegetables. Despite the Covid-19 lockdown, and the disruption of global trade due to the war in Ukraine, India remains relatively hunger free and food self-sufficient.
We have to thank MS Swaminathan, the principal architect of India’s Green Revolution and for his pivotal role in upending the paradigm of penury in the country.
Famine warrior
Swaminathan was born in 1925, in Kumbakonam, to parents committed to India’s freedom movement. His father was a medical doctor who set up practice in the heart of the Kaveri delta, far away from the ancestral home in Mankombu, a village in the lowlands of Kerala’s southern coast. Swaminathan’s father Sadasivan was devoted to helping fight the mosquito-transmitted disease called filariasis that made human legs swell so much to resemble an elephant’s.
“He mobilized school children to identify mosquito breeding grounds, then asked their parents to fill in stagnant pools and move garbage dumps and disinfect drains and sewers. New cases of the disease ceased to occur—a lesson, Swaminathan said later, in the power of collective action,” writes Charles Mann.
Swaminathan wanted to become a doctor like his father, but the horrific stories of famine deaths in Bengal steeled his resolve to help India find a way out of hunger. After a bachelor’s degree in botany at Thiruvanthapuram’s University College (a prerequisite course for pursuing medicine) Swaminathan enrolled into another bachelor’s course at the Coimbatore Agriculture College. There he graduated at the top of his class, and won almost every award on offer. A postgraduate research scholarship to study at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi followed. Swaminathan’s task there was to work on the solanaceae, a family of plants that includes tomatoes, potatoes, chillies and brinjal. In the meantime, at the prodding of relatives who were convinced that it was impossible to make a career in agri sciences, he had also passed the civil services examination in 1949. His rank allowed him to join the Indian Police Service (IPS), and he almost became a police officer. Luckily, for India and Swaminathan, he won a UNESCO fellowship at around the same time to study at Wageningen University, the Dutch national agricultural school.
“The Netherlands was just recovering from the war; famine of 1944–45 was a fresh memory. The university labs lacked heat and sometimes electricity. Swaminathan was asked to switch from brinjals to potatoes, a Dutch staple. Dutch potato fields were aswarm with parasitic nematodes. Wageningen was trying to fight them by breeding domesticated potatoes to wild, nematode-resistant relatives. But the wild and domesticated species had different numbers of chromosomes, which usually makes successful breeding impossible. Swaminathan figured out a workaround. The discovery was valuable enough to bring him to Cambridge University, in England, where he finished his PhD,” writes Mann.
A new breed
Swaminathan became one of the global pioneers in plant cytogenetics, a field of study on how chromosomes and their genetic information impact plant traits, breeding, and evolution.
Cambridge offered him a teaching position after he finished his dissertation, but he chose to join the University of Wisconsin as a postdoctoral fellow. The university at that time had the largest collection of Solanaceae plant family germplasm.
Germplasm is like a treasure chest of seeds, tissues, or cells that contains the genetic information needed to grow new plants.
Swaminathan’s rise at Wisconsin was swift. “Quick, affable, crisply logical, able to juggle multiple lines of inquiry at once, he had a knack for splitting difficult problems into manageable chunks that were each susceptible to the knives of scientific inquiry. His experiments just worked. Articles issued from Swaminathan’s typewriter in an orderly flow and appeared in major journals. Believing that he was destined for a brilliant career, Wisconsin offered him a position as a professor. He turned down the offer, returning to India in 1954 to help his new country,” writes Charles Mann.
Patriotic purpose
Swaminathan never lost track of the purpose of his pursuit of a career in agri science. “Why did I study genetics abroad? It was to produce enough food in India. So, I came back,” he told his biographer RD Iyer.
Agricultural research assignments to match Swaminathan’s stature were almost non-existent in India. He could only be accommodated in a temporary position as assistant botanist at the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack—a colonial era institution. There Swaminathan and his team worked on crossing sticky, short-grained Japanese rice, with Indian varieties that were fluffier. That in part led to the creation of India’s most popular rice even today called Sona-Masuri (an Indo-Japanese hybrid extensively trialled at a place called Mahsuri in Malaysia). Soon, Swaminathan was transferred to Delhi to work on wheat.
“Indian farmers had been working with wheat from the Stone Age gradually creating varieties that were suited to the nation’s climate and its culinary preference for the kind of amber-coloured, hard-grain wheat that makes the thin, light-coloured, puffy flatbread called chapati or roti. Like their Mexican counterparts, Indian farmers grew a scatter of different varieties in their fields, planting them sparsely to deter rust [a fungal disease common in crops such as wheat, barley and rye]. At IARI, Swaminathan quickly discovered that these varieties responded to fertilizer so heartily that they lodged—the same problem faced by Borlaug a few years before,” writes Mann.
Now, ‘lodging’ is a phenomenon where plants become so productive that their stalks can’t support the weight of their own grains and get knocked down by wind or rain. It’s like a group of tall, skinny people who try to carry massive backpacks but end up toppling over because of the weight. The grain crops had to be shorter, with a stronger stem.
Kindred spirits
Norman Borlaug was born eleven years before Swaminathan in a poor corn-growing family in Iowa, US. His family had to work so hard as to harvest and shuck 250,000 ears of corn by hand every year. Borlaug, by the standards of boys in his community, was lucky to attend even high school. He earned a PhD in plant pathology and genetics, and like Swaminathan, was driven by the desire to lift people out of poverty.
By a series of accidents, he ended up right after WW2 working in Mexico, on a program established by the Rockefeller Foundation to focus on improving corn production. Like Swaminathan, he had no track record of working on wheat, but was put in charge of it. He embarked on a massive breeding program all by himself, crossing thousands of different varieties of wheat, exposing them to various diseases including the most troublesome–stem rust–and picked the ones that survived. Through this toil of a decade, he created a kind of a super wheat that was not only resistant to stem rust, but also five times more productive than other common varieties.
Like Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, Swaminathan, its architect in India was pretty much solving the same problem at around the same time in the mid-1950s with far lesser resources. They weren’t even aware of the similar experiments taking place simultaneously across the world, let alone being personally acquainted.
“In 1955 Swaminathan and his IARI collaborators began taking wheat grain to a small particle accelerator at the Tata Institute in Mumbai. The accelerator sprayed out a beam of neutrons, which slammed into a target and produced gamma rays: ultra-high-energy photons. The researchers blasted wheat kernels with gamma rays for several hours, hoping that the gamma rays would tear into the DNA in the seeds and induce favourable mutations. In twenty-first-century terms, this was like trying to perform surgery with a chainsaw—a hopelessly crude procedure. In mid-twentieth-century terms, it was the most advanced method available. Most of the resultant plants failed to germinate or died quickly—the gamma rays had smashed up their DNA like wrecking balls. A few showed interesting characteristics, but none were short-strawed, at least that first year. Or the second. Or the third. Because Swaminathan couldn’t get enough financial backing to irradiate and grow seeds in large numbers, the odds of success were especially poor. Like Borlaug in Mexico, he was throwing darts at moving targets. Unlike Borlaug, he could throw only a few darts at a time. Still, he saw no other way to proceed,” writes Mann.
A tough path
With Nature unwilling to reveal Her secrets readily, a dejected Swaminathan showed his experimental plot to the Japanese wheat geneticist, Hitoshi Kihara who was visiting India in 1958. Kihara asked Swaminathan to get some dwarf, short stemmed, bigger grain bearing wheat samples developed by the US breeder Orville Vogel.
Vogel’s wheat was of the winter variety that wouldn’t suit Indian conditions. He in turn asked Swaminathan to approach Boralug, then working in Mexico on wheat that could flourish in tropical India. Swaminathan’s 1958 letter to Borlaug in Mexico City never reached.
In 1960, just when Borlaug was hired by the US food giant United Fruit Company to improve banana productivity in Honduras, he was asked by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (UN-FAO) to join an expert group to survey wheat and barley research in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
Borlaug was dismayed by the state of agri-science he witnessed everywhere. Most appalling was the approach of Indian wheat breeders who he thought were obsessed with the beauty of the grain rather than increasing yields. The first meeting between Borlaug and Swaminathan was disastrous. “They spoke for about an hour. Neither man seems to have been particularly impressed with the other. One can imagine Swaminathan paying little attention to the blunt, poorly educated foreigner who was trying to tell Indians what to do; Borlaug, for his part, may have seen the other man as the sort of smooth careerist,” says Mann.
Green shoots of a revolution
Despite the poor first impressions, Swaminathan’s openness to scientific ideas resulted in extensive trials of Borlaug’s Mexican wheat. In 1963, the two men met again.
Swaminathan took Borlaug and his students on a five-week harvest-time tour of north India and the agri research institutions. “This time the two men hit it off. Borlaug discovered that the man whom he had taken for a time-server had one of the most brilliantly swift agricultural minds. And Swaminathan learned that what he had taken for [Borlaug’s] brusque condescension was a directness and simplicity that he thought almost child-like,” records Mann.
Impressed by Swaminathan’s work, Borlaug sent a consignment of a wide range of seed materials of his two Mexican dwarf wheat varieties, Sonora-64 and Lerma Rojo to India in the following months. The seeds when planted in IARI’s plots responded so well to fertilizers and irrigation that they produced almost three times more than conventional varieties without being afflicted by diseases and pests. Multi-location testing of these wheat varieties in the 1963–64 winter season attested to the potential success at hand.
The breakthrough stage of the Green Revolution had truly begun. Farmers who were introduced to the ‘package’ of high-yielding varieties of seeds, access to fertilizers and good irrigation reported sensational results. In 1964–65, Swaminathan organized 1000 national demonstrations in one-hectare plots in the fields of hundreds of small farmers. The government offered Rs 500 a hectare for the cost of seeds and essential inputs. The results were spectacular; every farmer in Punjab wanted the new wheat seeds but there wasn’t enough of it.
A new beginning
In May 1964, India’s first and longest serving Prime Minister Nehru died. He was replaced by Lal Bahadur Shastri, an Independence leader of impeccable credentials who had a firmer understanding of India’s agrarian reality. Swaminathan’s pleas for greater investment in agri R&D and the farm sector in general found more receptive ears.
Shastri appointed C Subramaniam, a politician from Coimbatore with progressive ideas and a technocratic approach to farming and economic management as the minister for food and agriculture. Subramaniam was the minister for steel in the Nehru cabinet and this new assignment was widely perceived as a political demotion.
Shastri’s slogan ‘Jai Jawan Jai Kisan’, popular to this day, in effect signalled a departure from the Nehruvian course of prioritizing heavy industry over agriculture and national security.
Swaminathan’s suggestion to import 250 tonnes of Mexican semi-dwarf wheat to be planted on 3000 hectares was approved instantly. A bumper crop resulted. Based on this successful experience, Swaminathan and Borlaug pushed for the rapid adoption of Mexican wheat varieties in India, “Swaminathan the scientist became Swaminathan the promoter, undergoing the same transformation that Borlaug himself had earlier gone through in Mexico,” writes RD Iyer, Swaminathan’s biographer.
Even after the Shastri’s death in 1966, his successor Indira Gandhi, continued supporting the new farm programme unburdened by her father’s attachment to the heavy industry-led economic model. In 1968, the Green Revolution had started producing visible results. Wheat production jumped to 17 million tonnes from 12 million tonnes in a single year. “This increase was a revolutionary jump, not an evolutionary one,” says RD Iyer.
Blaming science
It is fashionable for environmentalists and activists to hold Swaminathan, Borlaug and the advances in science that led to the Green Revolution for all the crises of their imagination.
“Borlaug seldom replied directly, though the attacks stung. In private, he told friends that most of the criticism was sheer elitism. Somehow rich environmentalists in the West thought the world was better off if people in poor areas didn’t improve their lives. He had nothing against organic this or that but it was unrealistic to promote it as a solution to hunger in the world of 10 billion. And it was immoral to stand in the way of feeding hungry people,” writes Mann.
Borlaug may not have been too far off the mark. Such critiques, mostly put forth by the elites speaking with the benefit of hindsight and a full-stomach, are as bereft of nuance as India’s granaries in 1947. Addressing the Indian Science Congress at the Banaras Hindu University in 1968, when the Green Revolution’s footprint in India was marginal, Swaminathan said: “Exploitative agriculture offers great possibilities if carried out in a scientific manner, but poses great dangers if carried out with only an immediate profit or production motive. Intensive cultivation of land without conservation of soil fertility and soil structure would lead, ultimately, to the springing up of deserts. Irrigation without arrangements for proper drainage would result in soils getting alkaline or saline. Indiscriminate use of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides could cause adverse changes in biological balance and lead to an increase in the incidence of cancer and other diseases, through the toxic residues present in the grains or other edible parts. Unscientific tapping of groundwater will lead to the rapid exhaustion of this resource left to us through ages of natural farming. The rapid replacement of numerous locally adapted varieties with one-or-two high-yielding strains in large, contiguous areas would result in the spread of serious diseases capable of wiping out entire crops. The initiation of exploitative agriculture without a proper understanding of the various consequences of every one of the changes introduced into traditional agriculture, and without first building up a proper scientific and training base to sustain it, may only lead us, in the long run, to an era of agricultural disaster rather than one of agricultural prosperity.”
To hold our politicians, policymakers and corporations to account on matters as important as food and agriculture based on the scientific wisdom of Indian heroes such as MS Swaminathan would be a better tribute than a campaign to confer them with Bharat Ratna.
This small town in Karnataka is the vegetable nursery of India
Posted on September 27th, 2023
The right socio-economic conditions, availability of trainable talent, clement weather all year-round and a pioneering entrepreneur’s vision to harness it all setting up a sunrise-sector business turns a dozy place into a prosperous hub of startups. This isn’t yet another paean to Bengaluru’s status as the ‘Silicon Valley’ of India. It is the story of a place smack in the geographical centre of Karnataka, 300km to the northwest of Bengaluru called Ranebennur that’s the epicentre of India’s hybrid vegetable seed production.
Since seeds are the most critical and fundamental unit of input in agriculture, it would not be an exaggeration to call such a place ‘startup town’.
Seeds of success
Ranebennur is where India’s largescale, commercial production of hybrid vegetable seeds began in the late 1970s. Today, most major national and multinational agriculture companies from Syngenta to Pioneer to Namdhari have operations in the region. The farmers in this small region produce roughly Rs 500-crore worth of hybrid seeds of vegetables such as tomatoes, chillies, brinjal, okra and assorted gourds.
Such is the economic impact of hybrid seed companies on the local economy that it is common to find homes bearing homage to them. A seed company’s name inscribed in concrete suffixed with the word ‘krupe’ (benevolence) on the forehead of concrete homes painted in bright Vaastu-compliant colours ranging from parrot green to lemon yellow and Barbie pink isn’t a rare sight.
Hybrid hero
All of it is thanks to Manmohan Attavar a pioneering horticulture scientist and entrepreneur who must rank alongside MS Swaminathan and Verghese Kurien in the pantheon of modern India’s agriculture renaissance figures.
Everything on our plate today is a result of hybrid crops from cereals such as rice and wheat to ‘desi’ tomatoes to vegetables such as brinjal and gourds that we consider ‘indigenous’ because of their origins in India.
Hybrid crops are created by crossing two different but related plants to get the best traits of both parents, like two different varieties of tomatoes to create an offspring with desirable traits such as higher yields and resistance to a specific disease.
The science of plenty
Hybrid seeds became commercially important in the early to mid-20th century. The development and commercialization of hybrid seed varieties gained momentum in the 1930s and 1940s, with major advancements in crops like corn, cotton, and vegetables. This led to the widespread adoption of hybrid seeds, which significantly contributed to the Green Revolution and the increase in global agricultural productivity during the mid-20th century.
Don’t mistake them for genetically modified (GM) crops that involve altering the genes of a plant in a lab. For Instance, the genetically modified ‘Golden Rice’ was created by adding to the rice genome a gene from the daffodil plant to increase 20-fold beta-carotene levels in rice. Hybridization not only increases productivity but also ensures uniformity of produce, better quality and longer shelf life.
Mamnohan Attavar was born in 1932 in Karkala, a small town on the southern coast of Karnataka. He took up an unfancied course in horticulture at the agriculture college in the northern Karnataka town of Dharwad and earned a PhD in the US. With a loan of $14,000 from Chicago’s Ball Seed company where he had trained, Attavar set up a company in 1965, based in Bengaluru called Indo-American Hybrid Seeds (IAHS) that produced hybrid petunia flower seeds from the city for the US market.
First bloom
In fact, attempts to master hybrids began with flowers.
In 1716, Thomas Fairchild, a nurseryman in London was the first to scientifically produce an artificial hybrid flower known as Fairchild’s Mule. It was a cross between a flower called the sweet william and a pink carnation. He did this by taking pollen from the sweet william with a feather, and brushing it onto the stigma of the pink carnation. This was long before the science of genetics was established. Fairchild’s Mule preceded the firm scientific grasp of the idea of plant sex.
The concept of plant reproduction had been understood by humans for centuries, although not necessarily in the way we understand it today in scientific terms. Ancient civilizations, such as the Egyptians and Greeks, had some knowledge of how plants reproduced, often associating it with male and female principles or gods.
However, the scientific understanding of plant reproduction, including the roles of male and female parts in flowers and the mechanisms of pollination and fertilization, took shape only in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist best known for his work on taxonomy —the standardized, scientific way of naming and categorizing species, homo sapiens, for example–made substantial advancements in the 18th century in understanding the reproductive structures of plants. Linnaeus ascertained the roles of the male and female parts that coexisted in flowers.
A fruitful partnership
As business grew, Attavar approached Karnataka’s legendary horticulturist MH Marigowda for help to replicate the lessons learnt creating hybrid flower seeds for the US market to ring in a vegetable revolution right here in India.
Marigowda, with a PhD from Harvard was the then Karnataka’s director of horticulture who set up HOPCOMS, a pioneering cooperative that linked vegetable farmers to urban consumers. Marigowda supported Attavar by giving him access to polyhouses in Bengaluru’s iconic Lalbagh to experiment growing hybrid vegetables. Marigowda’s contribution is such that he is regarded as the ‘father of Indian horticulture’ and his birth anniversary on August 8 is celebrated as ‘Horticulture Day’ in the country.
In 1973, Attavar’s firm IAHS produced India’s first hybrid capsicum called Bharath and a variety of tomato called Karnataka. That’s why in many parts of India, the oblong variety is still popularly known as ‘Bangalore’ or ‘hybrid’ tomatoes, even if what is considered desi (globe-shaped and juicier) is a hybrid too.
While we can thank the Portuguese for introducing the fruit to India, without Attavar’s hybrid tomato revolution, Indian food as we know it—from rajma masala to rasam and ‘pink’ sauce pasta–may not taste as it does.
Then came other hybrid vegetables and even chillies. The popularity of red chilli varieties like Guntur Teja and Byadagi are the result of a post 1970s proliferation of hybrid seeds.
“My father identified Ranebennur as a hub for hybrid seed production at around 1979, and all the companies that you see today followed him,” says Santosh Attavar, the chairman of Indo-American Hybrid Seeds. Manmohan Attavar, a Padmashri awardee, died in 2017.
One-time wonder
Growing a crop for seeds is tougher than for food. Breeding hybrid seeds is even more complex.
In popular imagination, the food that we eat is the result of farmers saving a bit of their crop of say paddy or brinjal to convert it into seed for the next season. This method called the ‘farmer saved seed’ is how agriculture has been practiced from the time humans learnt to domesticate crops.
Farmer saved seeds maybe useful for subsistence farming, but the modern science of hybridization is inevitable to feed 1.4 billion Indians not to forget a global population of 8 billion.
Informal seed production can be like playing Russian roulette.
Farmer saved seeds may not have the same level of genetic uniformity and consistency as commercially produced hybrid or improved seeds. This variability can lead to inconsistent yields and poor disease resistance.
And over time, these seeds when continually replanted, lose their vigour. Hybrid seeds on the other hand cannot be reused at all.
The National Seed Association of India (NSAI) estimates that hybrids account for more than a third of the Rs 25,000 crore organized Indian seed market, not counting the farmer saved seeds and the informal. The hybrid vegetable seeds market is about Rs 2500 crore-3000 crore.
Blessed by geography
Back in the take 1970s when hybrids were only restricted to rice and wheat thanks to the Green Revolution, Attavar identified Ranebennur as the ideal place for large commercial production of hybrid seeds. Several factors worked in its favour. Chief among them was the climate and geography. Of the 10 agroclimatic zones of Karnataka, Ranebennur, located in the Haveri district is classified as a northern transition zone.
A transition zone is sandwiched between two different climatic or agricultural zones—in this case between the state’s northern plains and the drier southern plateau. Transition zones have a climate that share traits of the regions they separate, and can have microclimates, where local conditions differ from the broader climate pattern. This makes them suitable for growing a wider variety of crops across both the dry and wet seasons.
While a region such as Bengaluru is on average about 4⁰C cooler than Ranebennur, it is also much wetter with nearly 1000mm of annual rainfall compared to the latter’s 600mm. Seed production requires needs dry weather. Tomatoes for instance grow best under day and night time temperature of 21-25⁰C and 15-20⁰C respectively with humidity less than 60%.
Another reason why Attavar chose Ranebennur was because the average landholding of farmers here was smaller. Seed production is not only is labour intensive, but also needs hands-on every day attention. Smaller holdings allow farmers to be more attentive.
Beginnings of a boom
“He went from farm-to-farm convincing people to shift towards hybrid seed production,” recalls Santosh Attavar.
Assured procurement of seeds and better returns than producing crops for the commercial market was an attractive proposition for many progressive farmers. The tougher part however was training them in a process that required the skill and precision of a surgeon, the delicate craftsmanship of a goldsmith and a factory work floor manager’s attention towards quality control.
What Attavar started with 14 contract farmers in five villages around Ranebennur has now grown into business in the region involving more than 500 companies and several lakh farmers.
A hybrid plant is first perfected in the labs and R&D fields of the organization that wants to commercialize it. Let’s take the example of tomatoes, one of the most important hybrid seed crops in Ranebennur. Scientists begin by identifying the male and female parent lines or varieties whose specific traits such as fruit size, taste, resistance to specific diseases or climatic conditions they want the progeny to carry.
The fruits that are born out of this marriage solemnized by scientists are called the ‘first filial generation’ or F1 hybrids. The creation of a new commercially viable hybrid through this complex process of trial and error, field experiments and regulatory approvals typically takes about 7-10 years. Once perfected and approved, companies rely on farmers to produce the F1 hybrid seeds at a commercial scale by giving them access to the male and female parent lines.
A delicate operation
To grasp the complexity of the process of hybrid seed production, we must begin by understanding the anatomy of flowers.
In botany-speak, tomatoes belong to a class of plants that produce the ‘perfect flower’, that is, those with both male and female reproductive organs within the same flower structure. In other words, it has both stamens (the male parts, which produce pollen) and pistils (the female parts, which contain the stigma, style, and ovary for seed production) in a single flower.
Plants like cucumber and watermelon produce ‘imperfect flowers’ where pollination takes place from the male flower to the female.
In the tomato flower, mustard yellow and barely half the size of a fingernail, when dust-like pollen from the male sac called anther comes into contact with the stigma, an elephant snout-shaped female organ a fraction of the size of a pinhead resting on a stalk thinner than a toothbrush bristle, called style, reproduction begins. Facilitated in nature by insects such as bees or wind, this process is called self-pollination.
However, to produce hybrid seeds, self-pollination has to be prevented and the floral intercourse of stigma of the chosen female line and pollen from a different male has to be performed by human hands.
Seed farmers begin by emasculating, or removing the male anther sacs containing pollen using sterilized surgical forceps from the flowers of the female plant line before they being to bloom. When in bloom, natural self-pollination cannot be prevented. Workers wear a plastic ring around their middle finger that has another very tiny ring attached. That’s dipped into a small box containing pollen from the male line and dabbed onto the stigma.
Assured income
Companies such as IAHS usually only give farmers access to female lines and not the male parent to avoid others from stealing the pair. Only the pollens from the male lines are provided to the farmers.
Every tomato plant produces about 120 flowers; one unit (a quarter acre) of hybrid seed production has hundreds of plants; and this mating exercise has to be performed on every flower. Farmers need to ensure that of the 120 flowers on each plant, only 45-60 fruits get formed. More tomatoes mean greater burden on the plant’s physical resources and poorer quality fruits and seeds.
The difficulty of doesn’t end there. The hybrid units have to be at least a 100m away from commercial tomato fields to minimize cross pollination. Polyhouses offer better production but increase cost.
Timing matters too. Flowers need to be emasculated between 2-6PM and hand pollinated between 8-11AM for best results. And results matter for both farmers and the companies that contract them to manufacture hybrid seeds.
The tomato buds are emasculated by removing the male parts
The stigma or the female part is dusted with pollen from the chosen male variety
Every quarter-acre unit of hybrid tomato seed farm needs about 20 labourers working the whole day for a month during the pollination season post August. The peak seed production happens between November and January.
“For more than two decades, hybrid seed production was the ticket to prosperity for thousands of farmers in Ranebennur. Their lifestyle has completely changed,” says BM Somashekar, who runs a small hybrid firm called SB Seeds he founded in 2000 when the hybrid seed business had begun to boom.
Almost all of the hybrid seed production in Ranebennur happens under a contract between companies and farmers. Farmers contracted directly by large companies or their intermediaries are given the seeds of the female parent lines and part of the money in advance to help them managed the resource intensive operations. Companies in turn can only sell hybrid seeds that that pass stringent quality checks.
“Seed production is two to three times more profitable for us than growing for the commercial food market. Food market prices fluctuate wildly and we can never time the market. Here there is greater income stability. Germination ratio and hybrid vigour are two of the most important parameters for us. Seed farmers are paid in full only if the germination ratio is above 95% [if 95 out of a hundred seeds from a batch sprout in the nursery] and the productivity under test conditions good. It’s harder work, but a high-reward business,” says Maltesh, a hybrid seed farmer in Ranebennur.
If the germination ratio falls below the government mandated levels, the batch of seeds ought to be burnt by the company in the presence of the contracted farmer.
Farmers for their part have to harvest the fruits, extract and process the seeds and supply them dry to the companies. One unit of a tomato seed farm produces between 25-40kg of seeds.
An acre of commercial tomato crop needs not more than 20 grams of good quality hybrid seeds at a cost of about Rs 10,000. In horticulture seeds constitute about 5-7% of the production cost.
Seed stealers
The stakes are high for both farmers and the firms that contract them. Even a small oversight on the farmers’ part could potentially damage the entire batch of seeds in a unit. Company executives check on the progress of the crops and if the prescribed procedures are followed at least twice a week.
But there’s another reason too. Cross purchase of seeds is rampant. Unscrupulous agents lure farmers under contract with a company that’s painstakingly developed a new hybrid to sell them the seeds on the side at a hefty premium.
“Even if the company closely monitors production, the farmer can say he could only harvest 45kg of the seeds instead of the estimated 60kg and sell to shady operators often at thrice the price. These fly-by-night companies sell the seeds developed by companies at a huge investment under their brand,” explains Somashekar of SB Seeds.
Untapped potential
Unethical business practices aside, the lack of intellectual property rights protection for seed companies in India cripples Indian private sector R&D investments. Multinational companies too are wary of introducing their new lines of seeds. What they sell in India is often seeds that are a few generations older than those sold in other markets. That’s one of the reasons why Indian seed research remains heavily reliant on public sector seed research.
“In India many great scientists continue to do remarkable work. But what is the motivation to innovate. Even when I know my company’s material is being sold in the market by someone else, I can’t do much to contest that,” says Attavar.
While that maybe a nationwide problem, Ranebennur’s hybrid ride is getting bumpier.
“The climate is becoming more unpredictable. Over time if you keep growing the same crops at a place there is disease pressure and a buildup of pest attacks. Also, with the younger generation leaving agriculture for jobs in cities, there is a shortage of skilled in seed farmers,” says Manjunath Kulkarni, regional production manager (Karnataka), Kalash Seeds, a company headquartered in Jalna, Maharashtra that sources vegetable seeds from thousands of farmers in Ranebennur.
Indeed, many companies have begun shifting production to Koppal, some 125km to the northeast in Karnataka, or even to Jalgaon and Jalna in Maharashtra.
According to the World Bank, India imports seeds worth $850 million annually from countries such as The Netherlands, Italy and Thailand. That level of import dependance on something as fundamental as seeds is troublesome for a large agricultural nation.
“There is now a major government push towards ‘make in India’ and self-reliance. That should also extend to seeds because it is the foundation of food systems. India has plenty of arable land and 15 agroclimatic zones. With enabling policies, we can create many hubs like Ranebennur across the country and not just be self-reliant buy also become a significant exporter,” says Attavar.
How plums can be a juicy business for India’s Himalayan farmers
Posted on August 21st, 2023
The English language has an adjectival fascination for plums compared to other fruits. An idea that seems crazy is ‘bananas’; blowing a ‘raspberry’ isn’t cool in polite company; an unwelcome warm winter is ‘strawberry’ spring; jealousy equals sour ‘grapes’; when things go wrong, they go ‘pear-shaped’; but a well-paying job is ‘plum’, a decadent cake rich in raisins is a ‘plum cake’, never mind there’s usually no plums involved. And, it’s for good reason.
Himalayan treat
Farmers in Raugi village, 15km to the north of Kullu in Himachal Pradesh, a horticultural hotbed of India, unaware of English idioms, use a more evocative and accurate description. They call plums ‘pedon ka gulab jamun’ or gulab jamun-on-trees. Plums are of course, botanically speaking, a part of the rose family alongside apples, peaches, strawberries and pears.
A ripe Santa Rosa plum, the most commonly grown variety in the region, is deep velvet red that often tips over to the territory of purple. It is pretty much a gulab jamun-sized globe with taut, translucent skin extending an invitation the incisors and canines can’t resist. Whether the bite results in thin jets or trickling rivulets of the sweet-and-tart nectar down the chin is the line that separates primitive passion and civilized public conduct. Plum’s flesh is a colour of crisp lager, with texture somewhere at the midpoint of apple’s initial resistance and banana’s tender surrender.
The new apple
While currently nowhere near the commercial importance of apples in Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir, or as ubiquitous as bananas in peninsular India, plums hold great potential thanks to growing consumer demand and higher profits it offers farmers. It could be the next urban ‘super-fruit’. Plums like several other fruits are packed with healthy anti-oxidants, fibre, minerals like potassium, calcium, C and B-complex vitamins. But its newfound preference is on account of the relatively low glycemic index that makes it diabetes friendly (in moderate quantities, of course). It has a glycemic load ranging from 4-12 compared to 7-16 for bananas. Glycemic load is a measure that combines the quantity of carbohydrates in a food with how quickly those carbohydrates raise blood sugar levels, giving a better understanding of its potential impact on blood sugar.
Plums fetch farmers in Kullu anywhere between Rs 100-200/kg compared to Rs 50-80 for apples. “Not only are prices higher, plums require only 10% of the input cost and with a climate less cold than needed for apples. They can grow in bony soil at an altitude of 2000-7000ft and beyond. The state has to look beyond apples because the orchards are now three generations or nearly 100-years old,” says Deepak Singha, a retired salesman of IT products such as Xerox machines and computers from a traditional family of fruit farmers who now heads the Plum Growers Forum (PGF) based in Solan.
Apples accrue nearly Rs 6,000 crore to Himachal’s economy. Plums are barely in sight with an estimated share of Rs 350 crore. Plus, plums are one of the ficklest fruits to ferry from the farms in Himalayan slopes to shop shelves in Mumbai and Bengaluru.
Handle with care
“The plum needs to be handled like a baby. It can be the new apple, a gamechanger for farmers and consumers alike,” says Naresh Jawa, the 65-year-old founder and CEO of Allfresh, a supply chain firm specializing in plums, apples and oranges. Jawa, a railway engineer who set up and headed the cold chain subsidiary of the state-owned logistics firm Container Corporation (Concor) knows a thing or two about handling fruits.
“Apples can easily be transported over long distances and cold-stored for more than a year. But plums need the same cool ambient temperature from the farm all the way through to the supermarket. It needs refrigerated transportation, and even then, can only last 25-30 days,” he says.
The business of selling plums is therefore a frantic race against time; the ecstasy of biting into the fruit is matched by the complexity and logistical precision its farm-to-mouth journey requires.
Botanists consider northern China the birthplace of the kind of plums that are consumed today. But its commercial cultivation was perfected in Japan and hence classified as Japanese plums. They are round in shape, sweet and juicier compared to the oval, and almost peachy-firm European plums.
“Plums were not a serious crop in the Indian Himalayan region. It was just an intercrop for farmers with poor soil. They were a byproduct of apples. Plums were half-heartedly harvested and sold for as cheap as Rs 25/kg,” says PGF’s Singha. Now, they can be a life saver in lands long abused by apple monoculture that saps soil of nutrients and require ever more chemical intervention.
Finding a sweet-spot
With growing demand in a big domestic market ready to pay a premium for exotic fruits, plums are being sourced directly from farmers by companies such as Allfresh, now owned by Waycool, a large fresh produce and FMCG firm, and the Adani Group’s farm division. Companies with modern supply chains and organised sourcing can pay the farmers up to Rs 5/kg more than local traders.
Unlike apples that require a ‘chill-time’ or night time temperature below 7⁰ Celsius for 1200 hours, the Japanese plums can do with 250-300 hours making them adaptable even to low altitudes.
The peak season for plums is June, a profitable segway to apple-picking that begins by mid-August. But in June, pounded by monsoon rains, when the rocks are slippery and the grass waist-high, the orchards in the steep mountain slopes face the greatest danger. On a rare blue-sky day, sunlight seems to ping back from the black-and-white eastern Pir Panjal range peering over Kullu.
A bigha of land (a little more than half-an-acre) can house up to 70 plum trees. A plum tree itself is like a giant, 25-foot-high woody rosebush without the spikes. Each tree can yield 200kg of plums. On his three bighas, Vineet Chauhan a 33-year-old plum farmer in Kangti village makes a net profit of Rs 3 lakh after paying for farm labourers Rs 600 a day. Seasonal workers from UP, Bihar and Rajasthan harvest and lug at least 100kg of fruit a day trekking mostly barefoot or at times wearing flip-flops that seem to offer the certainty of a fatal accident rather than cushion for the sole.
The fruits, if they have to travel more than a 1000 km have to be harvested when they are 10% ripe. The best time to pluck the putative gulab jamuns is when they are gooseberry in colour, when their butt-crack like ridge starts turning red. The summer sun in April and May sets off the sugaring process that takes full effect while the plums are in transit. Wet hands and rain during the harvest can wipe off the natural, ashen wax that coats the fruits bringing down their market price. “You need delicate hands, from plucking to packing. You can’t afford to bruise plums. Rot sets in on a bruise,” says Chetram, a portly farmer in Raugi nailing the cheap reaper wood boxes each with a hundred plums carefully stacked on a bed of newsprint and straw.
The plums are harvested, sorted and graded at a clearing closest to the farm that has a concrete roof by 4pm. Then they make the overnight journey, weather permitting (June is also the month of heavy landslides and traffic jams that can last a couple of days) from Himachal to markets in Punjab and Delhi for street sale, or to the cold storages around the National Capital Region (NCR) for travels further south. More than half of the 90,000 tonnes of plums India’s hill farmers produce rots before it can reach the consumers. In the absence of refrigeration, the heat and humidity of India’s plains can turn a container of plums into a watery mess in a day.
“I was amazed some years ago to see plums sold in Mumbai’s wholesale markets for 400/kg. If plums could travel from Spain to India, why could we not get them from Kullu to Karnataka? I had seen Himachal farmers selling the fruit for as little as Rs 20/kg. There was demand for plums among high-end consumers and the supermarket chain infrastructure in south Indian cities was much better than in Delhi. We anyway sourced apples from Himachal. So, we took it up as a challenge to deliver Indian plums all the way from Himachal to Chennai when they were in season,” says Jawa.
Cold chain for a hot market
For the first few years since starting the experiment in 2015, Allfresh made losses worsened by two years of Covid-19 when in-store buying all but stopped. This season, the company has sold 140 tonnes of plums, most of it in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai.
“Earlier, the traders, commission agents and even agri universities had no interest in plums. Small orchard farmers in the hills who have less than two acres of land depended on the agents to give them farming advice and price information. Now, the ability to link farmers to far flung markets has made plums lucrative,” explains Jawa.
The shelf life of plums and other similarly delicate stone fruits such as peaches and cherries can be extended far beyond the current 25-30 days with modern packaging infrastructure closer to the orchards.
The fruits can last much longer if they are cooled to the core at 3-4⁰ Celsius a few hours after harvest. We can then even look at export markets. But that kind of capital investment in infrastructure has to come from the government,” says PGW’s Singha.
Forget exports, to be able to create a countrywide market for such a fantastic produce would be a ‘plum’ deal for India’s farmers and consumers alike.
How 27 techies who wanted to change Indian agri ended up creating a Rs 250-cr organic startup
Posted on August 10th, 2023
Organic dairy firm Akshayakalpa’s 24-acre corporate headquarters-cum-factory near Tiptur, 150km to the west of Bengaluru, gives off the strong vibes of a solemn spiritual ashram.
When steel-tanker milk trucks emitting diesel fumes aren’t lined up at the gate, the thickly wooded entrance, with parijatas in full bloom and countless other aromatics in the flower beds, conjure up the smell of scented vibhuti or sacred ash.
Business such as sales review and training is conducted in squat, circular thatch-roofed huts amidst experimental plots with rows of sugary cherry tomatoes and fern-like carrots.
An unpaved red soil track leads to the source of the rich and healthy smell of manure and ammonia–the gaushala, rather in this case, the R&D centre with about twenty cows reared on organic principles Akshayakalpa wants its partner farmers to follow.
A conversation between farmer and consumer
Among the mostly local employees clad in indigo polo-Ts there are plenty of tourists from Bengaluru even on a weekday. They are a mix of converts and potential converts. It’s a dip of the toe for them. A first-hand experience of the organic food heaven helps spread Akshayakalpa’s organic gospel better than Instagram reels or wordy brochures.
They can caress the cows that wander untethered like deer in a zoo but keen as Labrador pups to befriend strangers and watch them feed on organic Napier grass grown a few metres away. A guided tour of the milk factory and a vegetarian meal at the small canteen with food made entirely from the organic produce grown in the campus follow.
On some days, the dip could turn into immersion, if Shashi Kumar, the stocky 50-year-old co-founder and CEO of Akshayakalpa is around.
Radical chic
Shashi Kumar was a rebel who wanted to ring in a revolution. Softened by the pressure cooker of time burnt on the stove of social entrepreneurship in India’s farm sector, he now appears yogic in his attire and attitude. Clothes in varying fades of blue seem to be his improvisation of the fakir’s ochre. Shashi’s Bhishma-like beard touches the second button, and the unkempt mop of hair reaches beyond the collar of the steel-blue shirt. He can’t quite recall when the shirt was bought, but the pair of denims are decidedly older. For him, the kind consumerism manifested by the hoarding of clothes, and the agricultural crises, have a common link: mindless, unthinking consumption and the methods of production that make it possible.
In 2010, Shashi, an IT professional with a successful career at Wipro, and 27 other friends from a similar background chucked up their jobs with the lofty ambition of “changing” Indian agriculture. They were convinced it was utterly broken. A lot of data and a bit of lived experience showed farming was pretty much unviable as a profession for small farmers in India. Couldn’t Indian farmers become rich, was the question that animated the group.
“The cost of food for the consumer is massively underwritten by State subsidy for inputs such as fertilizers, water and power. The farmers subsidise it further by not properly accounting for their land and labour. The situation is so unsustainable that we soon won’t have people to grow food for us,” says Shashi.
They believed it needed fixing by those who had cracked problems of a higher order. Arrogance was an angel investor in Akshayakalpa.
“IT guys think they are best read, best educated, they know everything about the world. Changing agriculture was easy. That’s the aham [ego] we had. But when we started getting deeper and deeper into farming, we realised that it changed us rather than a bunch of IT guys changing it. The only way to start is to pick a small problem and try to solve it,” says Shashi with a soft, beatific voice, in a south Karnataka accent unsullied by a decade of onsite-ing in the US.
Low cash flow
Not surprisingly, milk is the nucleus of Akshyakalpa’s business. It works with 800 dairy farmers in two close-knit clusters near Tiptur in Karnataka and in a village near Chengalpattu, 80 km from Chennai. Its factory processes 80,000 litres of milk a day producing premium products for Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad markets ranging from milk to ghee that command at least twice the price of popular brands thanks to its organic and antibiotic-free credentials.
“No policy can change the viability of farming. Only the consumers can if they start looking at every aspect of their consumption. They must become more quality conscious and ask questions about who produces their food at what cost, how it gets to them, and how good the food can be if they are paying such a low price. They should go visit a farmer, work with them in the field for a day and share a meal. It’s in their own interest. Today social media glorifies farming and romanticises the farmers so much that it is nowhere near the actual, grim reality,” says Shashi. The purpose of the farm tours is partly to start a much-needed conversation between farmers and consumers.
According to Askshayakalpa, farmers with as little as two-acres who comply with the company’s organic and broader regenerative agricultural practices can make as much as Rs 150,000 a month in about two years of transitioning from conventional methods. Half of the monthly payout goes into the bank account of the female member of a farmer household to ensure that they are adequately compensated for their often-invisible role in running the operations, and also as a safeguard against the hard earned money ending up in liquor shops.
A fourth of its 800 employees consist of field workers and trained agronomists who start work at 6 am on their two-wheelers visiting the 800-odd farmers on a daily basis, addressing their problems, gathering cattle health data and ensuring they stick to organic practices.
Soil is supreme
Shashi’s inspiration for having a strong technical support network for farmers is the work of researchers at the University of California in Davis. “Farmers in the Salinas valley, a big agri belt, don’t have to go anywhere to access new innovations and scientific research. The university’s agri department works out of their fields. Thanks to such coordinated work, almost all farmers have successfully turned organic,” he explains.
Organic or not, dairy is not an easy business to operate, especially at the relatively tiny scale Akshayakalpa operates. Its monthly sales currently exceed Rs 20 crore. More than half of India’s dairy sector is controlled by co-operatives brands such as Amul in Gujarat, Nandini in Karnataka and Mother Dairy in Delhi and many parts of north India. “But our real interest is soil, not milk. Yes, dairy, poultry and coconut generate much-needed, quick cash flow for the farmer. We want to make them part of a larger ecosystem where the cow dung and poultry manure [it has three times more nitrogen that cow dung] substitute inputs like fertilizers and rejuvenate soil, used to make clean domestic fuel, and where beekeeping integrated into the farming system increases pollination,” says Shashi.
Proponents of organic farming say it is entirely misunderstood in India. While produce gets the attention, it is all about soil management. Keeping it nutrient rich and teeming with microflora is at the heart of good organic farming practices.
Organic riches
Shashi grew up in a farming family around Tiptur. His father, still an active farmer at 78, did not have the means to educate his three children. He put young Shashi in his elder brother GN Srinivas Reddy’s care. Reddy was a veterinarian and a well-regarded farm activist influenced by the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave. “My father wanted me to be an engineer because he knew one who was successful. Engineers were role models, farmers weren’t,” says Shashi.
When Akshayakalpa’s founders travelled the villages to better acquaint themselves with rural realities, they found that most places had turned into retirement homes. There was hardly anyone below the age of 45. Who would produce food for the next generation if the youth desert the farms?
An engineering degree that led to a good life on the US west coast held little charm. Reddy not merely infected his nephew with his own brand of agri- idealism but also became a co-founder of Akshayakalpa. “Before we made our first sale, my uncle went on a 25-day milk-diet to convince himself that our product was good. One of my best memories is the two of us, on the first day of our consumer outreach, convincing eighteen morning joggers in Krishna Rao Park in Bengaluru’s Basavangudi, to become Akshayakalpa subscribers after we gave them a tasting sample,” adds Shashi.
We work with one farmer in a village for a number of years; support him in the transition to organic; and prove to others around that this is a viable model. We run an open-source model. Anyone is free to copy what we do.
Shashi Kumar
Founder and CEO, Akshayakalpa Organic
Can the consumer care?
Despite being in the direct-to-consumer market, Akshayakalpa’s ambitions are modest. At best, it hopes to work with 5000 farmers.
“We work with one farmer in a village for a number of years; support him in the transition to organic; and prove to others around that this is a viable model. We want that farmer to become an inspiration to everyone around. We run an open-source model. Anyone is free to come and copy what we do. In fact, we’d count that as our success,” says Shashi.
Selling expensive organic farm produce in a price conscious market such as India is a hard grind. For example, an Akshayakalpa country egg costs Rs 24 or roughly three times the price of one at the corner shop. Keeping consumer prices reasonable, means taking a hit on margins; lowering the margins for retailers would discourage them from sticking products that require additional care like refrigeration; and competing in the direct-to-consumer market with multiple giants can be brutal and expensive.
By Shashi’s estimation, Akshayakalpa has been on the verge of bankruptcy on six occasions in the 12 years it has been in business. Each time bailed out somehow by his friends who Shashi jokingly calls the 27 fools. Akshayakalpa’s commitment to regenerative farm practices keeping farm income at the centre has won it many admirers. At one of the low points in the business recently, Shashi says he turned to Nitin Kamat, the founder and CEO of Zerodha, the largest stock broking firm in India. “I don’t even know him well, but he was ready to back us,” recalls Shashi.
Last year, Zerodha’s Rainmatter Foundation that focusses on climate action invested in Akshayakalpa.
“What the company is really doing is building water, soil and farm resilience ground up that translates into broader rural resilience. Many of the practices its farmers follow start percolating to their neighbours. If even a third of the dairies in India start operating like Akshayakalpa, it would represent a gigantic change in our agroecology,” says Sameer Shisodia, CEO, Rainmatter Foundation.
The odds in the marketplace seem stacked against a small player such as Akshayakalpa trying to change farming practices and consumer attitudes towards food at once. But it would be good if it succeeded. “Look, it is too big a problem to solve in one lifetime of work. All we can do is try.”
A new Amul-like collective farm movement called FPC to feed India’s future
Posted on August 2nd, 2023
Savita Gadre, 38, is a short, wiry and proud woman. It’s likely her flesh and bones are sinewed by chutzpah. Clad in an aquamarine sari with chunky silver embroidery, Gadre and her colleague Ramshila Kudape, are at a spiritual ashram on the outskirts of Hyderabad to attend the annual Lighthouse Conclave of farmer producer companies (FPC) organised by Samunnati, one of India’s largest private sector financiers in agriculture.
Her home in Temani Khurd village, 25km from Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh is far away from pretty much everywhere. The trip to Hyderabad would take four instead of the scheduled two days. Gadre’s husband groans on the phone that she’s been away too long neglecting her domestic duties. “Hum BOD [board of directors] hain. Haan ghar se baahar hain, par aapka hi toh naam roshan kar rahe hain [yes, I’m away from home, but I’m only making you proud],” snaps Gadre.
Fruits of success
Gadre and Kudape are directors on the board of an all-women FPC called Chhindwara Organic Farmers Enterprise (COFE).
A farmer producer company or FPC is a social enterprise that’s a hybrid between a cooperative, such as Amul, and a private limited company. An FPC can be formed when 10 or more farmers in a region band together. But it has to be owned and managed by its member-farmers.
COFE has more than 900 women farmer members across 214 predominantly tribal villages. The FPC, founded with the help of an NGO called Srijan which ran a self-help group (SHG) for women, works with farmers who harvest custard apples as forest produce. The women used to lug 25kg of custard apples for 10km to sell them for as little as Rs 50. Now, thanks to the power of collectivisation, they make almost ten times more. COFE processes the custard apple pulp, packages, freezes and sells it to large ice cream companies like Dinshaw’s in Nagpur at Rs 180/kg.
With the experience of operating a cold chain, the company now also sells frozen peas gathered from local women farmers when custard apples aren’t in season. It also has a dal processing plant with a capacity of one tonne a day and supplies organic cotton grown by its members to local ginning mills.
“In the past, we had no identity of our own. When someone came visiting and if my husband or any male member of the family was not at home, my natural response was only to say ghar pe koi nahi hai [there’s no one home] and rush inside. Now we meet buyers in big cities, find new orders and run the whole business by ourselves,” says Gadre. COFE has a turnover of Rs 57 lakh.
Creating 10,000 FPCs such as COFE across the country is a keystone in the government’s plans to increase chronically low small farmer incomes. To develop the FPC movement in the country, the government has made a budgetary allocation of Rs 6,865 crore besides a raft of other schemes to increase the access to money and markets for such companies.
The way out of distress
Nearly 75% of Indian farmers own less than one hectare of land–barely the size of a cricket field. The average monthly income of an Indian farming household, according to the latest government data, is Rs 10,218. That roughly translates to Rs 340 a day, at par with daily wages unskilled labourers in many states get under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).
“To be a farmer in India is like fighting a ten-headed Ravana. When you think you’ve solved one problem, and nine more crop up. We are up against countless invisible and unpredictable factors. First, there is nature. A whole year’s hard work can be washed away by unseasonal rains at harvest time; water shortage kills us. The global prices may crash or the government might change its policy overnight. There is simply no way a small farmer can win. Indian farmers have a choice. They can collectivise or quit,” says Vilas Shinde, the founder and chairman of Sahyadri Farms, India’s largest FPC based in Nashik with a turnover in excess of Rs 1000 crore.
The Indian agro-economy is pretty much designed to make the smallholder farmer fail. Small farmers buy all their inputs (pesticides, seeds, fertilizers and equipment) at retail rates and sell their output at wholesale prices. They have absolutely no bargaining power when buying or selling. But collectivising offers a way out of the rut.
“FPCs enable small farmers to come together and negotiate better prices for their produce. By pooling their resources, they can command better market access, negotiate fair prices, and reduce their dependence on middlemen. This enhances their income and improves economic sustainability,” says Anilkumar SG, CEO, Samunnati, a Chennai-based company that finances FPCs, creates market linkages for them and offers advisory services.
The idea of FPCs was mooted by a government committee headed by economist YK Alagh in 2000. In 2003 the creation of a special class of companies called FPCs was legislated by an amendment to the Company Act, 1956. But a national policy for the promotion of FPCs was put in place only by 2013.
FPCs enable small farmers to come together and negotiate better prices for their produce. By pooling their resources, they command better market access and reduce dependency on middlemen.
Anilkumar SG
Founder and CEO, Samunnati
The taste of Amul
“India has a long history of farmers cooperatives playing an active role in supplying credit and farm inputs and organising marketing. Experience of dairy cooperatives, especially the farmer-owned and operated Amul model in mobilising milk surplus from millions of small holders is a great success story. FPCs can have a similar impact on other segments of farming,” says Ramesh Chand, member Niti Aayog.
Unlike cooperatives, the FPCs are free of government nominees on its board. That helps them evade political interference, be in full control of operations and employ the entrepreneurial energy of the member farmers to the fullest.
FPCs can establish direct market linkages for farmers, enabling them to bypass intermediaries and access larger markets. They can also facilitate value addition activities such as processing, packaging, and branding, which increase the profitability of agricultural produce.
For farmers, being mere suppliers of raw material is a recipe for declining income. Any value addition, even something as simple as sorting and grading of produce, or basic packaging closer to the farm becomes an economic multiplier. By providing access to markets and value-added opportunities, FPCs help small farmers capture a larger share of the value chain.
A richer blend
The Araku Valley in Andhra Pradesh’s northeastern edge bordering Odisha has now become one of the more fashionable coffee supplying regions. The small plantations owned almost entirely by tribal farmers in the low altitude hills of Eastern Ghats still remain untouched by the intensive chemical farming practices of Karnataka’s Kodagu and Chikkamagaluru coffee belts. While the cachet of Araku’s arabica coffee increases among consumers, the tribal farmers who grow them are far from prosperous.
“The lack of awareness is such that our coffee farmers in Araku continue to sell their produce to the middlemen at whatever price they quote,” says Gabbada Chittibabu, a seven-acre coffee farmer in the region who is now a director at an FPC called Manyatorana. The company created in 2019 has more than 1000 members and deals in turmeric and pepper as well.
“Once we organised ourselves as an FPC, we had the scale to process the berries into beans and warehouse it instead of selling at throwaway prices,” says Chittibabu. Manyatorana sells its beans to Tata Coffee (some of it ends up in Starbucks’ blends sold in India) and Blue Tokai. Working with large institutional buyers not only guarantees fair procurement but also improves crop quality based on their feedback and inputs. Manyatorana plans to increase its turnover from the current Rs 3 crore to Rs 15 crore in the next two years as its membership expands.
The fragrance of cooperation
The town of Pushkar in central Rajasthan’s Ajmer district is one of the biggest rose growing regions in the country. Nand Kishor Saini, a 38-year-old rose farmer with a postgraduate degree describes the condition of fellow farmers in the region as pitiable. Saini is the CEO of the Pushkar Rural Agricultural Youth and Employment Producer Company, an FPC set up by an NGO called Krishak Vikas Sansthan that works with more than 500 rose farmers as its shareholders.
Founded in 2015, the company processes the rose and amla its members pool together into value added products such as gulkand, candy and murabba or sweet pickles. With a gulkand processing capacity of 1200 tonnes a year, it sells its products direct to consumers under the brand name Pushkarwala. Procuring at scale for value addition not only allows the company to pay farmers in its network Rs 20/kg more than market rates, but also work with them consistently using modern techniques to increase productivity.
In the Rajput dominated villages in the rose catchment of Pushkar, the social acceptance for women to go out and work remains fairly low. The company works with 300 women to extract the petals, sort and grade them and in the process earn Rs 250-300 a day.
Saini is a relentless travelling salesman setting up stalls at exhibitions across the country organised by National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development. Pushkarwala’s differentiator among the hundreds of manufacturers in the region is that its gulkand is made over sixty days instead of the hurried 24 hours others take. “Anyone who tastes our product will become our long-term customer. We have 60-70 permanent buyers especially in south India. We plan to start exporting our products soon,” says Saini.
A capital problem
The other big advantage of FPCs is that they help small farmers access formal credit and financial services, which are often inaccessible to individual farmers. They can negotiate better credit terms, avail group loans, and improve access to agricultural inputs, technology, and infrastructure. This enhances productivity, efficiency, and the overall competitiveness of small farmers. The ability of farmers to collectively manage risks such as price volatility, natural disasters, and market uncertainties makes it feasible for private lenders like Samunnati, public sector banks and institutions like NABARD to channel loans to farmers through the FPCs.
To sell inputs like seeds and fertilizers at discounted price to farmers and procuring produce at a better price from farmers are crucial for them in building trust and engagement among member farmers. For that, timely availability of working capital is critical.
But given that most FPCs in India are fairly young with a low capital base, little formal credit history, collateral, and financial history, they find it difficult to secure loans from traditional financial institutions. “We use a unique underwriting mechanism based on ‘social capital’ and ‘trade capital’. Evaluating the historical relationships with the FPCs’ suppliers and buyers would indicate their performance potential. This makes them eligible for working capital loans to conduct efficient business and strengthen their member engagement,” says Samunnati’s Anilkumar.
Samunnati links up FPCs with large buyers such as ITC, traders, processors and exporters. This helps FPCs eliminate transaction costs by bypassing numerous middlemen.
And after one or two cycles of working capital and repayments, FPCs attain the scale necessary to sustain their operations.
And after one or two cycles of working capital and repayments, FPCs attain the scale necessary to sustain their operations.
Building leadership
Even with policy support, there are many challenges in the path towards creating thousands of Amul-like winners in a wide range of agricultural commodities.
To begin with, there is a lack of awareness among farmers of the benefits and potential of forming FPCs, let alone the many incentives offered by central and state governments. Convincing farmers to unite and collaborate could be even harder. “Farmers need to see tangible benefits from collectivization to be motivated to participate. To win their trust, you must demonstrate the gains quickly and in a transparent manner,” says Sachin Thube, a journalist who founded a successful FPC called Green Up in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district.
Most importantly, FPCs need sound governance structures and strong leadership. Several stakeholders in the ecosystem including Sahyadri, Samunnati, NABARD, NGOs and philanthropies such as the Deshpande Foundation run FPC capacity building and leadership development programmes. But that’s no match for the personal drive and determination of farmers such as Savita Gadre in taking charge of their destiny.
The real reasons why tomato is suddenly so expensive in India
Posted on July 17th, 2023
Two rather different sets of rocketry-related headlines have caught India’s attention in recent weeks: India’s second attempt at a moon landing through Chandrayaan 3, and the skyrocketing prices of tomatoes.
It begs the rhetorical question, on the lines often posed by the Western media much to the irritation of Indians: despite accounting for the country’s vastness and the diversity of its challenges, how does India manage to send a two-tonne payload to the moon across 3.85 lakh km while struggling to reliably supply tomatoes from Dewas to Darbhanga, merely 1300 km apart?
In June and July 2023, the retail price of tomatoes in India rose astronomically above Rs 100/kg. According to the National Horticulture Board’s data, consumers in cities such as Kolkata and Patna need to shell out as much as Rs 150-200. Tomato slices aren’t to be seen in sandwiches and burgers served up by even the big quick service food chains. Your order of pasta arrabbiata is likely to turn the restaurant owner’s face redder than the sauce.
In contrast, just a few months ago in April, angry farmers were dumping tomatoes on the road in protest as their selling price dropped as low as Rs 1-2/kg. It was a repeat of the onion farmers’ plight in February and March.
Feast or famine
India is the world’s second largest producer of fruits and vegetables, including tomatoes. Its output of staple vegetables such as tomato, onion and potatoes (TOP) is significantly higher than domestic demand. Yet, why is India’s fresh food market in a permanent feast-or-famine mode?
Unwilling to miss out on a PR opportunity during a crisis, the Ministry of Consumer affairs on June 30, 2023 launched the ‘Tomato Grand Challenge’ inviting students, research scholars, and the industry to a “hackathon to generate innovative ideas to enhance tomato value chain and ensure its availability at affordable prices”.
Even if the government had no time to read the reports and suggestions of the countless experts it commissioned, it could have called up someone like Vilas Shinde, the chairman of Sahyadri Farms, a Rs 1000 crore farmer producer company (FPC) and one of the largest tomato buyers in the country.
An FPC is like any other company, but wholly owned and operated by farmers in a particular region.
Sahyadri processes 1200 tonnes of tomato a day and manufactures 50% of Kissan ketchup, a brand owned by the global FMCG giant Unilever.
India produces nearly 22 million tonnes of tomatoes and consumes about 20 million tonnes. With paltry exports, there should be no price shock.
“The simple reason for high tomato prices is supply-and-demand principles of economics. In April when the prices went to Rs 1-2/kg, farmers had no motivation to pay attention to their crop. They were not even getting 30% of their production cost as income. They will obviously uproot their tomato plants and try to grow something else. Every agricultural commodity glut in India will be followed by a massive shortage. It’s a vicious cycle for both farmers and consumers,” says Shinde.
Sweet and sour
But it needn’t be so. India is one of the few countries in the world that can grow tomatoes all-year.
India’s tomato production peak occurs between October and April. “The best time for tomatoes pan-India is post February. A day time temperature of 25-32 degrees Celsius is ideal. When heat crosses 38 degrees, the fruit-setting doesn’t happen,” explains AT Sadashiva, a former principal scientist at Indian Institute of Horticulture Sciences (IIHR), Bengaluru, and renowned tomato breeder who has developed several varieties of tomatoes that yield more than 40 tonnes per season in his 30-year-stint as a public sector scientist. Creating a commercially viable new plant variety can take as much as a decade.
Tomato in India is a four-month crop that starts yielding after 60 days of sowing.
“When prices started to crash in March, most farmers made massive losses with their first harvest and didn’t pay any attention to the next two months of yield. There was no point spending on water, pesticides or even harvesting the crop. Our income was barely Rs 1 lakh per crop compared to the usual Rs 2.5-3 lakh. Many didn’t bother sowing the monsoon season tomatoes. They switched to bitter gourd or bottle gourd,” says Ganesh Kadam, a two-acre tomato farmer in Nashik.
During the summer months of May and June, supplies from Narayangaon in Maharastra’s Pune district and Kolar region in the Andhra-Karnataka border form the country’s tomato lifeline.“This year there was the cucumber mosaic virus, and untimely rains that damaged the tomato crop in Kolar,” adds Sadahiva .Excessive heat, rainfall or pest attacks do have local impact on output, but to blame nature alone and explain away a recurring crisis would be a cop out.
No secret sauce
“We have failed to create a milk-like ecosystem for vegetables. Milk goes bad in four hours, tomatoes can last four to five days. But there is no way to store or process tomatoes in or near our mandis. The only solution is the creation of an integrated value chain where farmers grow to demand and convert the surplus into processed products. Farmers have to control this value chain,” says Sahyadri’s Shinde.
India’s tomato productivity at 10 tonnes per acre is considerably below even the global average of 35 tonnes. The country’s much vaunted ‘Kisan Rail’ scheme that hoped to connect producers and consumers through subsidised freight rates and dedicated carriages barely functions.
The first step towards an integrated approach, according to Shinde, must begin with helping farmers achieve yields of 40 tonnes/acre. That would automatically bring the cost of production down.
“The government has to incentivise the private sector to set up tomato processing plants. At Sahyadri, we buy tomatoes for processing when there is a glut. When we start buying in large volumes, the prices stabilise. Even partial-processing of fresh food can extend its life by six months. Tomatoes can be processed to last a couple of years. When farmers are assured of stable prices, they can focus on producing crops that are profitable for them and healthy for consumers,” says Shinde.
India’s tomato processing infrastructure is so poor that it is considerably cheaper to import tomato paste of a better quality from China. Also, a myopic focus on the domestic fresh tomato market comes at the cost of popularising processing-grade tomato varieties among farmers that would fetch them better prices. Such tomatoes need to be sweeter and have lower acidity and water content.
The work of India’s scientists such as Sadashiva and farmer entrepreneurs like Shinde would continue to go to waste until there is a policy that matches their will.
“Tomato prices will come down in November. Consumers will be happy. Farmers will dump their produce on the road, yet again. Uske baad kya [what thereafter]” asks Shinde.
There will be yet another cycle of farmer protest and consumer distress. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to predict that.
A Kerala entrepreneur’s jackfruit startup that’s fighting India’s diabetes ‘pandemic’
Posted on July 10th, 2023
Startup ideas can strike you if you stare out of the window long enough.
James Joseph, 52, returned to India in 2007 after a stint in the UK and US as a director of executive engagement at Microsoft. He had wangled a deal with the tech giant to work remotely, out of a village near Aluva, a ten-minute drive from the Kochi airport, instead of its Bengaluru office in India, among other things, to be able to give his children a taste of the “slow life”. The arrangement worked out pretty well. Well enough for Joseph to win the firm’s ‘Employee of the Year’ award in 2010.
In 2013, at the goading of fellow Malayali Kris Gopalakrishnan, a co-founder and former CEO of Infosys, Joseph decided to take a year off from work and write a book called God’s Own Office: How One Man Worked for a Global Giant from His Village.
The sight of a giant jackfruit tree in the front yard every time he looked out of the window near his writing desk, and childhood nostalgia for the fruit inspired him to start-up a full-fledged business around it called Jackfruit365.
The company makes flour from raw or unripe jackfruit that can be added to chapati atta or idli and dosa batter without altering the taste while getting the benefits of jackfruit’s high fibre and diabetes-resisting qualities.
A wasted bounty
“Growing up in Kerala you are never too far away from jackfruit. There is an adage that one jackfruit tree in the backyard can extend a person’s life by ten years. It is so plentiful that people don’t even bother to harvest. It just drops to the ground and rots away. The big fruits are now such a nuisance that people are chopping jack trees off,” says Joseph.
While writing the book, he became determined to find a way to put this bounty of nature to more profitable use and give it some good PR.
In India, the home of the jackfruit, the biggest tree-growing fruit in the world, Indians say some terrible things about it, though most don’t know it exists. North Indians hate the ripe fruit for the smell they find unpleasant and, erm, reminiscent of excrement.
It looks frightful too—giant (weighing up to 15 kilos) and spiky. Experts would tell you that you must always run your palm over the fruit before buying one. When the skin is leathery and the spikes blunt, the fruit is ripe for consumption.
My daughter goes to a school with a jack tree that produces slightly sickly fruits with wavy instead of the usual round skin. The tree forms the axis of the communal dining area. Despite five years of familiarity with the tree, and now aged 14, she is still too scared to sup in its shade.
In the south, jackfruit has an exalted status. According to ancient Tamil literature, it is part of the divine troika alongside mango and banana; its wood is used to make the mridangam. Kerala officially declared it the state fruit in 2018. Karnataka’s coastal and hill regions, and the Tumakuru district to the north of Bengaluru jostle for the claim of producing the best jackfruits.
Bengal and Odisha too have a great tradition of jackfruit consumption. Yet, even in these parts, jackfruit gets so little love that we end up wasting almost half our output.
An image makeover
During the writing of the book, Joseph turned into a fulltime jackfruit evangelist coaxing chefs at fancy restaurants in Kerala to include raw jackfruit in innovative ways in a variety of dishes, conning his guests into believing it was some kind of animal protein.
“In India, the typical plate of even those who can afford a nutritious diet, comprises 50% carbohydrates in the form of rice or roti, 25% proteins and vegetables respectively. In fact, vegetables should ideally be 50% of our meal. We are addicted to a carbohydrate dense diet that is often at the root of many lifestyle diseases,” says Joseph.
His idea was if the west can eat Caesar salad, why can’t India get into the habit of eating chakka puzhukku [steamed raw jackfruit tempered with grated coconut, green chillies mustard and garlic], quite popular and still a staple in many parts of Kerala.
“I wanted to rebrand a commodity into a high-value product. If the rich start eating something, the poor too will want to,” adds Joseph.
The neutral-tasting chakka puzukku is essentially a vegetable salad rich in fibre, and a rice substitute that could be had with gravies like fish curry. Joseph’s book had a small chapter on all his experiments to mainstream raw jackfruit including selling burgers made with it.
Out of his admiration for the former Indian President, APJ Abdul Kalam, Joseph made sure to send the first copy of the book in 2014 to him. In November of that year, he got a call from Kalam’s office inviting him for a meeting in Delhi.
Of all the things in the book, Kalam was keen to find out more about Joseph’s work on jackfruit.
The President’s brief
Kalam was convinced a “Second Green Revolution” that matched the IT revolution held the keys to India’s progress. He was intrigued by Joseph’s ideas on making more out of a natural produce going to waste.
Joseph narrated to Kalam his now well-rehearsed script about raw jackfruit having 40% less carbs and two-to-four times more fibre than rice or wheat. “Kalam went silent for about three minutes. I was worried stiff. Then he said, a high-fibre meal always translates into low sugar absorption. That’s a given. There’s one new thing here: most fruits when unripe are acidic. Jackfruit is neutral. But do remember, in India, it’s easier to change religion than food habits. You are an engineer. Find a way to make the whole of India eat green jackfruit; the housewives are the most influential nutritionists, get them on your side. When you do that, I’ll personally come with you to every part of the country and campaign for your idea,” recounts Joseph.
This simple, yet powerful insight became a one-line product brief for Joseph. Could the idea be turned into something like adding iodine unobtrusively to common salt to tackle a public health problem at scale? After all, fortifying wheat flour with jackfruit might benefit not just consumers but also incentivise jackfruit farmers.
The challenge was accepted and within a couple of years, Joseph has found a patented method for dehydrating raw jackfruit and turning that into flour, and most importantly, a flour with the right binding factor that when added to rice batter would not make the dosa stick to the tawa, or a roti to break when mixed with atta. By 2017, the flour branded as Jackfruit 365 was in the market. Sadly, Kalam died in 2015 before Joseph could demonstrate the progress on his challenge.
Building evidence
Not just that, Joseph using his training and experience as an automobile engineer invented a patented device for mechanised, assembly line cutting and extracting of jackfruit pods—the biggest deterrent for even the fruit’s faithful.
“The labour cost of processing jackfruit is very high. Not many people want to handle such a latex-heavy, sticky and gummy fruit. Also, it ripens very fast. The buildup of sugar even in cut raw jackfruit accelerates, so it has to be processed very quickly. I went around the world asking industrial designers to come up with a scalable solution. The structure of jackfruit is different from others like apples. Each fruit has hundreds of bulbs of seed-containing flesh around a stringy core. Everyone gave up, and I had to come up with my own design,” he explains.
From the early days of his evangelism, Joseph was convinced about the anti-diabetic properties of raw jackfruit, but making such claims needed scientific validation and clinical trials.
“While the product was out, we were selling it without telling people the actual reason for buying,” says Joseph.
By 2020, the clinical trial conducted at the government medical college in Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, and its results published in the science journal Nature presented at the annual conference of the American Diabetes Association, allowed Joseph to explicitly make the claim about Jackfruit365 flour helping fight type 2 diabetes in 90 days by lowering blood sugar levels without breaking Indian advertising and food safety regulations.
Type 2, the most common form of diabetes, is a lifelong disease caused by a high level of sugar or glucose in the blood. Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas that transports glucose into the body cells where it is stored and later used for energy. With type 2 diabetes, the cells do not respond appropriately to insulin leading to what is known as insulin resistance. As a result, the cells do not get the necessary glucose to release energy.
When sugar cannot enter cells, a high level of it builds up in the blood and the body is unable to use the glucose for energy. This condition called hyperglycaemia leads to the symptoms of type 2 diabetes.
The ticking time-bomb called diabetes
According to a recent Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) study, there are more than 100 million diabetics and 136 million prediabetics in the country. Adults with diabetes have a two-to three-fold increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.
The ability to make a claim for the anti-diabetes qualities of the product, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when physical activity was low and health concerns peaked, turned Jackfruit365 an overnight success on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon.
Joseph’s sales pitch was that adding 30g, or a tablespoon per meal, of jackfruit flour per day to make idli batter or chapati atta could deliver a food item with pharma-grade efficacy.
The sales witnessed a hockey-stick growth. It was the third-biggest selling grocery item on Amazon after Maggi noodles and Tata Salt. According to Joseph, Jackfruit365 clocks sales of more than Rs 1 crore a month just on Amazon with a cumulative customer base of more than 500,000. The National Startup Award in the food processing category in 2020 also helped.
With nearly 1200 grocery and pharmaceutical stores across south India stocking the product, the demand was such that the company had run out of production capacity. It had to pause its marketing campaign. Joseph estimates that the processing capacity of about 1500 jackfruits a day or roughly 15 tonnes needs to go up to 60 tonnes shortly to keep up with demand.
“I wonder how much more popular jackfruit would have been if Dr Kalam was alive to make good his promise to me.” You might have to gaze out of the window to make a guesstimate.
Is ‘cuddly’ Amul the newest ‘crony-capitalist’ from Gujarat curdling India’s milk market?
Posted on May 26th, 2023
The hardcore anti-BJP Opposition politicians seem to have discovered a new bogey business from Gujarat, whose name begins with A, to add to list comprising Ambani and Adani. Amul, one of India’s most beloved brands and a Rs 72,000 crore co-operative giant owned by the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) has become a frequent fly in the unpasteurised milk of Indian politics.
On May 25, 2023, while on an official visit to Singapore and Japan, MK Stalin, the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister released on Twitter his letter to Amit Shah, the Union Home Minister and Minister of Cooperation opposing Amul’s procurement of milk from the northern districts of the state. “Recently, it has come to our notice that Amul has utilised their multi-state co-operative license to install chilling centres and a processing plant in Krishnagiri district and planned to procure milk through FPOs [Farmer Producer Organisations] and SHGs [Self-help Groups] in and around Krishnagiri, Dharmapuri, Vellore, Ranipet, Tirupathur, Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur districts of our state,” he wrote.
Spilling the milk of cooperation
This he argued would create unhealthy competition among milk cooperatives in India and asked Shah to direct Amul to stop all procurement from Tamil Nadu Cooperative Milk Producers’ Federation or Aavin’s (its commercial brand) milkshed area.
“It has been the norm in India to let cooperatives thrive without infringing on each other’s milkshed. Such cross procurement goes against the spirit of ‘Operation White Flood’ and will exacerbate problems for consumers given the prevailing milk shortage scenario in the country,” he added.
Fearing a local ‘behemoth’
This comes barely a month after Amul’s decision to sell its fresh milk and curds in Bengaluru was used by the Congress to clabber the electoral milk in Karnataka. Congress and Janata Dal (Secular), then in opposition, claimed that it was part of the Centre’s plans to weaken Karnataka’s own beloved cooperative milk brand Nandini for it to be eventually gobbled up by Amul.
“Milk has clearly become a subject to settle political scores. The large number of farmers engaged in dairy farming makes them a valuable vote bank in any state. Stalin has seen the Congress use the issue cleverly in adjoining Karnataka and could be trying to replicate it,” says Kuldeep Sharma, a veteran dairy technologist who runs a dairy consultancy. Amul already procures milk from two other southern states Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
Milk has clearly become a subject to settle political scores. The large number of farmers engaged in dairy farming makes them a valuable vote bank in any state. Stalin has seen the Congress use the issue cleverly in adjoining Karnataka and could be trying to replicate it.
Kuldeep Sharma
Dairy expert and Founder, Suruchi Consultants
The issue in Karnataka was about Amul expanding its sales while Tamil Nadu is peeved by it procuring directly from the state’s farmers. The common theme here, however, is the portrayal of Amul as a corporate marauder in a cooperative’s cloak.
While Amul’s commercial heft (it is the among the 10 biggest milk processors in the world), the war chest for expansion and pan-India brand recognition lends credibility to such a caricature, it would at the same time be a lazy explanation to shy away from a serious examination of the health of India’s dairy sector and the cooperative movement becoming a pawn in the politics of populism.
The roots of a revolution
It is instructive to go back a bit in history and understand the birth and success of the cooperative movement.
The Green Revolution is considered one of the most important events in the history of modern India. But the gains from the White Revolution are far more spectacular. The Operation Flood or the White Revolution set in motion in 1970 has now made India the largest milk producer in the world.
The 220 million tonnes of milk it produced in 2022 is about 24% of the global output. Indians have access to 440g of milk a day, far more than the recommended daily average of 387g. Milk is by far the most valuable component of Indian agriculture (bigger in value than rice and wheat) and the dairy industry accounts for nearly 5% of the country’s economy.
In 1970, the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) officially launched ‘the billion-litre idea’ with the goal to take India’s dairy industry from a drop to a flood. It was to become the biggest dairy development programme in the world.
Operation Flood would work in a completely decentralised fashion. Milk would be collected by people of the villages; at the district level the dairies would be handled by the district unions; at the state level the marketing would be taken care of by the marketing federations. It was to ensure that the entire value chain remained in the hands of the small farmers. In effect, the White Revolution involved the replication of the “Anand/Amul Model” countrywide.
The White Revolution broadly rung in three fundamental changes. One, it created a nationwide chain of milk-specific cooperatives that could source milk from a network of millions of small farmers owning as few as two or three animals. With access to big volumes of milk, the cooperatives could invest in large processing infrastructure.
They set up small rural collection centres with milk chilling and basic quality check equipment where farmers could sell their output twice a day. The quality checks ensured that farmers’ milk was tested for the fat content, and they were paid fairly in accordance with quality not quantity of milk. At once, it brought in a level of quality assurance the country’s unorganised milk sector was not used to.
Two, the White Revolution introduced new technologies that improved milk productivity. Native Indian cattle breeds such as Sindhi were cross-bred with European Jersey, Brown Swiss and Holstein-Friesian cows. The cross-bred cattle could withstand the hot and tropical Indian conditions, and yet produce more milk. This could only be accomplished by making veterinary services and techniques such as artificial insemination more accessible.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, an extremely perishable produce of farmers was effectively linked to urban markets. All regional cooperatives branded their dairy products—from Amul in Gujarat to Sudha in Bihar, and a national marketing campaign around milk and its benefits as a cheap and accessible source of nutrition helped create sustainable demand.
Thinning milk
But now, some experts contend, lack of attention to breeding programmes and mindless populism has pushed India towards the end-point of the gains from the White Revolution. There are legitimate concerns about India’s milk production plateauing.
“Tamil Nadu complaining about Amul today is like a person crying about theft after leaving their house without a lock. It began with Kerala and is spreading elsewhere. In the guise of subsidising the farmer with higher prices, the cooperatives controlled by the state governments have been subsidising the consumer with cheap milk. It leaves them with no money to focus on cattle breeding R&D. When two pure bred cows—Indian and exotic—are crossed you get higher hybrid vigour from the first generation or F1 hybrids [the best traits of the pure-bred parents. Hardiness from Indian lines and increased productivity from foreign breeds like Jersey]. When you cross the subsequent generations indiscriminately, productivity is bound to get affected. We have simply not paid attention to our native breed stock,” says Rajeshwaran Selvarajan, professor, public policy, Development Management Institute, Patna, who specialises in the dairy sector.
Tamil Nadu complaining about Amul today is like a person crying about theft after leaving their house without a lock. In the guise of subsidising the farmer with higher prices, the cooperatives controlled by the state governments have been subsidising the consumer with cheap milk.
Rajeshwaran Selvarajan
Professor, public Policy, Development Management Institute, Patna
This is how state-level populism has been chipping away at of Indian agriculture’s bright spot. Tamil Nadu’s Aavin for instance procures cow milk from farmers at about Rs 34/litre and the retail price of its standard toned milk is Rs 40/litre (the lowest in the country alongside Karnataka). Keeping consumer prices artificially low results in not just low income for farmers but also throttles the private sector. Private dairies have to pay at least Rs 2 more than the state cooperatives to convince the farmers to sell to them, offer superior agronomy services to retain their loyalty, and then compete in the retail market.
During the recent Karnataka election campaign, Rahul Gandhi promised dairy farmers that the state procurement subsidy for milk would be raised to Rs 7 from Rs 5. Such subsidies amount to more than Rs 5000 crore annually.
The scourge of subsidy
“Subsidy is a cancer that affects the entire industry. It accounts for anywhere between 7-20% of the price of milk across states. How can the private sector compete with such a disadvantage? The states can account for it as a recurring loss and finance it. In fact it is not even going to the farmers, but ending up with consumers. If they had invested that subsidy over a decade in improving productivity and infrastructure, the whole of India’s dairy sector would have benefitted,” said RG Chandramogan, the founder and MD of Hatsun Agro, the largest Indian private sector dairy firm at the Food Conclave organised by the Telangana government recently.
In fact, in states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat and Punjab for where the retail price of a litre of milk is at least Rs 15 more than in Tamil Nadu or Karnataka, the income of farmers too is higher.
So, when Amul procures from Tamil Nadu, the farmers stand to gain at least Rs 2/litre with increased competition. Why is it such a bad thing?
“While its good for the farmers, I can understand the concerns of states like Tamil Nadu. Amul can’t simply use its financial muscle to enter new markets. They should have a dialogue with state cooperatives instead and reassure them on how they will strengthen the local milksheds. That would be in the spirit of cooperation,” says Kuldeep Sharma.
How to feed the world’s most populous country: grow more or eat less?
Posted on May 23rd, 2023
India is now the world’s most populous nation of 1.42 billion surpassing China. In November 2022, the world population touched 8 billion. How to feed 10 billion people by 2050 with lesser natural resources, is a subject that has fascinated award-winning US science journalist and writer Charles C Mann. It was the central question of his 2018 book The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, examined through the life and work of two contemporaneous American scientists with competing visions, William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Vogt was the father of modern environmentalism while Borlaug’s role in ushering in the Green Revolution through crops that yielded significantly more may be better known in India.
The Plate’s Managing Editor Aarthi Ramachandran spoke to Mann about these two influential figures and what their prescription to feed the world’s most populous nation might be.
Q1
Who are William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Why did you decide to write about them?
I’m a science journalist and I’ve been reporting on these issues and talking to scientists, activists and politicians about agricultural research and feeding the world for 30-40 years now.
Over time, I realised that the kind of answers I was hearing to my questions fell into two broad camps, each of which I realised was associated with people who lived and died in the 20th century, that most people hadn’t heard of, but were profoundly important.
One of them was Norman Borlaug. He is the chief figure associated with the Green Revolution, which is the combination of advanced seeds, irrigation and high throughput fertiliser that doubled or even tripled cereal production and had an enormous impact on world history. In fact, particularly on Indian history, because India is where the central part of the Green Revolution occurred.
He was an inspirational figure who told people you could use the tools of science and technology to produce more to give everybody as much as they want.
At the same time, I would hear from another set of people that this approach was fundamentally flawed. They said this is crazy because the world has planetary limits and a carrying capacity that we simply cannot surpass. I began to wonder, where did this idea come from?
And I realised that there is a guy even more obscure called William Vogt, who wrote out in 1948 the founding ideas of what has become the modern environmental movement, which is the only successful ideology to emerge from the 20th century.
I thought, this is extraordinary because these two people were working at the same place, at the same time and came to such radically different conclusions.
And they collided. The collision between people who are following them, knowingly or unknowingly, characterised much of what we hear in debate about environmental issues today. I thought that seemed like something worth learning more about, maybe telling other people about.
Q2
Why the title, ‘The Wizard and the Prophet’?
I initially wanted to call it ‘The Engineer and the Druid’ because Borlaug had an engineering mentality. For everything there had to be a practical solution. The world just consists of atoms. So, engineers think, let’s rearrange those atoms in a way that’s maximally profitable to everybody.
Vogt had a much more spiritual idea, that there are these webs of interactions of life that were as close to something sacred as he knew, and that we had to respect this.
But my publisher said nobody knows what a druid is. I disagreed. We went out to a Barnes Noble bookstore and my publisher asked the clerk for a book called ‘The Engineer and the Druid’. And the clerk looked at him and asked, “What’s the Druid?” So I decided to rename them ‘The Wizard’ and ‘The Prophet’. We are always talking about technology as wizardry. The Prophet, because Vogt was a person who was decrying both capitalism and the way that we were living.
Q3
How were their ideas and visions for the world ‘duelling’, as the tagline of your book says?
The striking thing is both were born poor, into the lower strata of US society. Borlaug was born in 1914 in a very poor part of Iowa. His family had to work enormously hard all the time. They grew corn and he would have to harvest and shuck 250,000 ears of corn by hand every year and then go to school.
He was lucky to go to high school. He then went on to college and even to graduate school, which is an extraordinary thing for a person in that time and place. He grew up thinking of agriculture as terrible but necessary drudgery.
He wanted to lift people out of poverty. And by a series of coincidences, he ended up right after WW2 working in Mexico, on a program established by the Rockefeller Foundation to focus on maize. But there was a tiny branch of this program that tried to breed wheat that was resistant to a disease called stem rust, and he was put in charge of it.
He had no money. He didn’t speak Spanish. He’d never been outside the United States. He’d never worked with wheat. He’d never done any kind of plant breeding. Borlaug was just wildly unqualified for the job. But he was enormously hard working. He decided to do a massive breeding program just all by himself, where he got thousands and thousands of different varieties and crossed them, exposed them to stem rust, and took the ones that survived. Through this toil of a decade, he created a kind of a super wheat that was not only resistant to stem rust, but also almost five times more productive than the previously known varieties.
It was really a remarkable accomplishment. Borlaug did many things that were against what was in the textbooks, but he didn’t know it. It turned out, partly by sheer luck, the textbooks were wrong. And it was a signal event in the history of humankind.
Vogt was born in 1902 in a poor part of Long Island in New York. He saw the natural world around him flattened by a deluge of houses, people, roads and cars. He was afflicted by polio when he was young. He walked with a cane and a limp and braces for all of his life.
Vogt became an ornithologist during the Great Depression. And by great luck managed to get a job in Peru where his task was to maximise the population of cormorant birds on the islands off the country’s coast.
The little-known islands off the coast of Peru called the Chincha Islands have been the home for thousands of years to cormorants. Roosting there in great numbers over thousands of years, they left enormous deposits of excrement which were mined by Asian slaves in the 19th century and became the world’s first high intensity fertiliser.
In fact, the whole idea that you could buy fertiliser in a store and then sprinkle it on the land and create an enormous productivity boost came from this mountain of bird excrement in the Chincha Islands. There was a global market for this natural fertiliser. But by the 1930s the bird poop deposits were going down and they wanted him to, as he put it, “augment the increment of excrement”.
There he came to a conclusion that was startling and important: that in some sense it was impossible. And the reason was the birds eat fish that were in the enormous fisheries off the coast of Peru. But fisheries are controlled by the temperature of the water.
There are cold water fisheries during La Nina years. When the waters get warm in the El Nino years, the fish move out from the shore and they move so far that the cormorants can’t reach them. When that happens, of course, the fish production is very low and the cormorants die.
So, he realised that if you do increase the number of cormorants to augment the increment of excrement, they will die in the next El Nino year. It was Vogt’s great contribution to say, wait a minute, this isn’t just true for islands off the coast of Peru, but for most, if not all, natural ecosystems.
They have limits on how much they can produce. And if you surpass those limits, you destroy them. This, he argued, was true for the earth as a whole. In 1948, he wrote The Road To Survival. It’s what I call the first, modern, we’re-all-going-to-hell book.
It is striking that Vogt was working in Latin America and indeed later in Mexico, at the same time as Bolraug. Bolraug looked at the problems and the people and said we need to give them more tools.
Vogt looked at the exact same landscape in the exact same conditions, and he said, the land is being over exploited. We need to pay attention to it. And this led to a clash between them that has continued to the present day between people who are focused on producing more and consuming less.
Q4
What are the hard and soft paths—that Borlaug and Vogt respectively advocated—that you write about? Can you give us some examples of how these ideas are relevant today?
This is a term I’ve borrowed from people who look at water. There’s probably no disagreement that the most pressing environmental problem is securing an adequate supply of fresh water for everyone.
The hard path is to say what we need to increase the supply. That involves things like mining aquifers that are not yet exploited, or desalination. The idea is you make more using technology. That’s the wizards’ answer.
The prophets will find it crazy. To begin with, this requires enormous amounts of energy. In addition, the salt from desalination is toxic. It’s extremely hard to get rid of. They are in the soft path. They say humans use water in crazily wasteful ways. Phoenix in the US’ extremely dry Southwest is full of golf courses. Hectares of grass is grown and soaked with water in very hot weather.
You can go into the central part of California which is a big agricultural area and see people growing rice in giant pools of water. That water is transported from mountains thousands of miles away to evaporate in the desert. So, the prophets would say, don’t grow rice or play golf in the desert.
Q5
India is perhaps the country where the Green Revolution had the most significant impact. One of the central figures of that from an Indian perspective is Dr MS Swaminathan. How do you see his role, and what were the Borlaug-Swaminathan interactions like?
Swaminathan was a critically important partner for Borlaug whose name is far less known than it should be. He is a really remarkable man in every way: a super good scientist, part of that first generation post-Independence; did first-rate work in the West and came back to India because he wanted to help his new country. He understood India in a way that Borlaug didn’t.
The development model in India associated with Nehru saw agriculture as stagnant. There were a huge number of people just mired in their farms and barely producing. The trick was to get them off of the farm so that they could be industrial workers and make steel and cement and all the things necessary for industrialised society.
So, the budgets for development were heavily skewed towards the industrial sector with the result that the agricultural sector really did lag. And this came to a head in the 1960s with the famine in Bihar.
There’s been a lot of historiography or argument about how bad it was, but it was clearly very real and also something that was used for political purposes. It was very embarrassing for the Congress government. They didn’t want to admit that there was a famine. Then there was a very paternalistic view of the US government, which was trying to make India a kind of client state.
The US wanted to trumpet the amount of aid it gave to India. So, from their point of view, they want to maximise the impression of the problem, while the Indian government wanted to minimise it. Borlaug came with wheat that he had developed in Mexico that he believed was a universal type of grain, and he brought it to India.
But Swaminathan did something incredible to it which Borlaug never really understood. He took Borlaug’s wheat, which was red and therefore dark in a way that was not good for chapatis and roti, and bred it to be white like Indian wheat.
It is important to produce food that people want. Swaminathan understood that. He adapted it to Indian conditions, gave it an Indian name, and was enormously successful.
Q6
If Vogt had to come up with a prescription for India today what would it look like? We know what Borlaug would have said because we’ve lived through his ideas here in India.
Well, first, he would say that there are too many people, not just in India, but everywhere. The benign view of this argument is that you’re just making it so difficult for natural systems to function because they have to function at the top of their carrying capacity. The less benign part of this is that you force down the population of black and brown people around the world. This led to, particularly in China, to tens of millions of forced sterilisations, forced abortions which were terrible.
You would like to think that Vogt would have learned from this. I think the answer that a modern-day person would give is if you want to reduce the pressure on natural systems, empower women. It seems to be a universal human characteristic that women, you know, don’t want to have 127 kids!
They could then run their own businesses, be teachers or do the things that anybody else would want to. The Vogtian thing would be to make that possible, to make sure that you have good schools, and adequate health care. So, I would say his answer would be to have good social policies.
A brief history of India’s White Revolution: the story of remarkable individuals and collective spirit
Posted on May 17th, 2023
1942
Colonial exploitation
In 1942-43, several Britishers living in Bombay suddenly fell sick. Investigations into the matter revealed that the chief cause was the milk they were consuming. A sample of milk was sent to UK for testing. The test result read: “The milk of Bombay is more polluted than the gutter water of London.” Consequently, the British government was forced to come up with a plan to improve the quality of milk coming into the city.
The search for a reliable source of milk in large volumes led the Bombay government to Kaira district (now called Kheda in Gujarat, but then part of Bombay Presidency) some 330 kilometres to the north.
By then Kaira already had the reputation of being a milk hub of sorts. Around 1895, an Englishman had started a butter factory some 15km north of Anand in this district. A German had also set up a casein factory nearby. Casein is the milk protein which in the early 20th century was used to make plastic. Casein plastic was used to make products like buttons and fountain pens. In 1926, a Parsi businessman Pestonjee Edulji had built a factory to make butter that was sold under the brand name Polson in the region. Polson was to be a household name before another brand from Anand killed it off.
The Bombay government asked Polson if it could supply milk every day to the city from Kaira across 330km. Something like this hadn’t been done in India. Polson pasteurised the milk in its plant and sent it in cans wrapped in gunny bags drenched in cold water. With this pioneering experiment of shipping liquid milk across such long distances in 1945 was born the Bombay Milk Scheme.
Polson had the monopoly on milk supply; Bombay offered a large readymade market for the farmers’ produce; and consumers had access to better quality. It was to be a win-win for all involved. Except it wasn’t.
The farmers of Kaira increased production to such an extent that the district had already become the largest and best-known milk producer in the entire region.
But the farmers very soon realised that only a fraction of the consumer price reached them as Polson and its contractors pocketed most of the money.
Kaira’s farmers recounted their story of exploitation to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who belonged to the same region. Patel’s answer was that the farmers had to be in control of the entire milk value chain—from production to marketing. He asked dairy farmers to organise milk cooperatives, which would give them control over the resources they generated. He assigned Morarji Desai, his deputy, to coordinate the effort. Desai identified a young freedom fighter and the vice chairman of the Kaira District Congress Committee, Tribhuvandas Patel, to head the cooperative.
Despite the formation of farmer groups, the problem of exploitation persisted. Polson would somehow find a way to pay farmers less. It would complain of flies in the milk or pay them less on account of lower fat content in the milk.
1945
Battle cry
When Tribhuvandas Patel and farmers went back to Sardar Patel, his battle cry was “Remove Polson”. But to do that the entire dairy movement in the district had to be united and, above all, they had to own their dairies. Since it was 1945, he warned the farmers that the British would not take such a move kindly.
1946
An Indian milk co-op is born
By January 1946, the farmers had decided to take on Polson and the government. They decided not to sell any milk to Polson and that a cooperative would be set up in every village of Kaira. A union of these cooperatives headquartered in Anand would process and market the milk. BMS rejected the proposal. The farmers of Kaira went on a strike for 15 days. They were happy to pour the milk on the streets rather than sell a drop to Polson. The strike crippled Polson and BMS went bust.
The British government relented hoping that bunch of Indian buffalo farmers and their leaders in Gandhi caps didn’t know a thing about dairy farming and would come crawling back to the old arrangement when their experiment inevitably bombed.
Through 1946, Tribhuvandas patel walked from village to village persuading farmers of Kaira to form cooperative milk societies. By December 1946, the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers Union Limited (KDCMPUL), the mother of Amul was born. India’s biggest market, Bombay, was now directly linked to the farmers of Kaira.
In 1946, a young engineer called Verghese Kurien was selected by the British government in India to study in Western universities and gain a Master’s degree. Kurien belonged to a wealthy and privileged Kerala Syrian Christian family. His grand uncle John Matthai was to become the independent India’s first Railway Minister. While young Kurien was interested in metallurgy and nuclear physics, he was chosen for a Government of India’s agriculture ministry sponsored degree at Michigan State University, then considered the best place for dairy research in the world.
1949
The unwilling young man
While Kurien had earned a master’s degree in metallurgy with some mandatory courses on dairy technology, upon his return to India, he was posted in Anand as a researcher in the Government India creamery in 1949. Disinterested in his job, Kurien was looking for the nearest exit.
1950
An offer that couldn’t be refused
The Kaira Cooperative’s plant was in the same campus as Kurien’s office. In his spare time, and there was plenty of it, he frequently helped fix the outdated 1910-era machinery it used.
After a routine repair job, Kurien told Tribhuvandas to scrap the rusty plant and build a new one if the cooperative had to have any chance of survival. Tribhivandas took up the challenge of arranging the Rs 40,000 it took for the new plant and asked Kurien to build it. It was merely an unpaid side gig for Kurien. When the plant was built and Kurien’s resignation from the government job finally accepted, Tribhuvandas offered him the job of the general manager at KDCMPUL in 1950. It would be tempting to say the rest is history. It wasn’t as easy.
1952
Bootstrapping a revolution
By 1952, against all odds, KDCMPUL was supplying 20,000 litres of milk compared to 2000 litres in 1948. Anand’s farmers were supplying milk to Bombay’s consumers in insulated railway vans.
The success of Kaira cooperative movement was by now in no doubt. But a problem of demand-and-supply cropped up as the Kaira-Bombay market linkage grew stronger. Buffaloes produced twice the milk in winters than summers. There was no market for the excess winter milk, while there was no way to store it for supply during the lean summer months.
The only solution was to set up a processing plant to convert the extra milk into products like butter and milk powder. While the Western world knew how to turn cow milk into powder, there was no way to make buffalo milk into reconstitutable powder.
Thankfully, Kurien’s mate at Michigan State University and ace dairy technologist Harichand Dalaya was at hand. Dalaya hailed from a prosperous Yadav family in Uttar Pradesh that ran a successful dairy business in Karachi with 300-odd Sindhi cows. The family had enough money to send him to Michigan before it was forced to wind up operations in Karachi post Partition. Dalaya invented a way to spray dry buffalo milk into powder when every single dairy technologist in the world had thought it impossible.
1955
Scaling up
Dalaya’s invention paved the way for India’s first milk powder and butter plant that was inaugurated by Prime Minster Jawaharlal Nehru on October 31, 1955, the birth anniversary of Sardar Patel.
1956
Amul the brand is born
By 1956, Kurien realised that Kaira Cooperative’s increased milk productivity needed an even bigger market, that in turn needed better branding and marketing. A chemist at the Cooperative came up with the name Amul. It was a derivative of the Sanskrit word ‘amulya’ that meant ‘priceless’. It not just symbolised the pride of swadeshi production, was short and catchy and could be an easy acronym for Anand Milk Union Limited. In 1957 Kaira Cooperative registered the brand ‘Amul’ that would soon become one of India’s best-known brands.
1964
For an Anand everywhere
On October 31,1964 when PM Lal Bahadur Shastri visited Anand on yet another birth anniversary of Sardar Patel, he asked Kurien to replicate the Anand model across India. Despite the support of the PM, the plan failed to take off due to bureaucratic meddling and turf wars within the government.
1965
The National Dairy Development board
To fulfil the wishes of the PM, and in national interest, Kurien convinced the Kaira Cooperative that it should create The National Dairy Development Board without central government funding in 1965.
1966
An advertising icon in born
In 1966, Amul upped its advertising game. It hired an agency called the Advertising and Sales Promotion Company (ASP) with a mandate to knock Polson off from its perch as Bombay’s top butter brand. ASP’s art director Eustace Fernandes created the iconic Amul girl to take on Polson’s ‘butter girl’. It had also launched several milk powder, butter, condensed milk, cheese and baby food.
1970
A billion litre dream
In July 1970, NDDB officially launched ‘the billion-litre idea’ with the goal to take India’s dairy industry from a drop to a flood. It was to become the biggest dairy development programme in the world.
Operation Flood would work in a completely decentralised fashion. Milk would be collected by people of the villages; at the district level the dairies would be handled by the district unions; at the state level the marketing would be taken care of by the marketing federations. It was to ensure that the entire value chain remained in the hands of the small farmers.
1976
Real life in reel
Manthan, a film based on Kurien’s efforts to collectivise Gujarat’s dairy farmers and the Operation Flood, directed by Shyam Benegal was released. Made on a shoestring budget of Rs 10 lakh funded entirely by the dairy farmers of Gujarat who contributed a rupee each.
The film starred young actors like Smita Patil, Girish Karnad, Naseeruddin Shah and Anant Nag and won several awards.
But Amul used it as part of its sales pitch to farmers to join the cooperative movement and drive home the message of the economic and social benefits of the cooperation.
1981
The White Revolution gathers steam
The second phase of Operation Flood from 1981 to 1985. It was implemented with the seed capital from European countries and a Rs 200 crore World Bank loan. During this period, the number of milksheds increased from 18 to 136. Moreover, 290 urban markets increased the outlets for milk produced. By the end of this phase, a self-sustaining system of 43,000 village cooperatives covering 4.25 million milk producers was well established. Milk powder production increased from 22,000 tonnes in the pre-Operation Flood year to 140,000 tons by 1989. Direct marketing of milk by producers’ cooperatives increased by several million litres a day.
1985
Investments in technology
The third phase of Operation Flood, which lasted from 1985 to 1996, added 30,000 new dairy cooperatives to the 42,000 existing societies. The number of women members and women’s dairy cooperative societies increased considerably. This phase focused on assisting unions to expand and strengthen their procurement and marketing infrastructure to manage the increasing volumes of milk. Veterinary health-care services, feed and artificial insemination services for cooperative members were extended. Animal health and nutrition was the big focus area.
1998
Becoming the world leader
In 1998, India overtook the US to become the largest milk producer in the world.
The same year, the World Bank published a report on the impact of dairy development in India and looked at its own contribution to this. The audit revealed that on the Rs 200 crore the World Bank invested in Operation Flood, the net return into India’s rural economy was a massive Rs 24,000 crore each year over a period of ten years. Certainly no other development programme, either before or since, has matched this remarkable input-output ratio.
2023
Challenges ahead
India remains the largest milk producer in the world with an annual output of 220 million tonnes. Milk is by far the most valuable component of Indian agriculture (bigger in value than rice and wheat) and the dairy industry accounts for nearly 5% of the country’s economy.
While the White Revolution helped India make enormous gains, the country’s milk productivity is still nowhere near global standards. In 2023, climate change, declining availability of fodder and creeping weaknesses in breeding programmes pose a challenge in retaining the advantages Operation Flood offered.