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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.
India’s White Revolution: from a trickle to Operation Flood
Posted on May 15th, 2023
India’s White Revolution that made the country abundant in milk was born in 1970.
The Green Revolution that helped India achieve self-sufficiency in foodgrains such as wheat and rice had a head start of more than five years.
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.
India’s milk production from 1950 to 1974 grew at annually at 1.36%, far below the rate of population growth. That meant the availability of milk for an Indian shrunk by 15% during the period. 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.
What did the White Revolution do?
The White Revolution broadly rung in three fundamental changes. One, 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.
An important outcome of The White Revolution was the impact on gender equality. Women’s participation in the dairy industry increased to nearly 70%.
Verghese Kurien, one of the architects of the White Revolution and a founder of the co-operative dairy brand Amul in his 2005 autobiography I Too Had a Dream notes: “In 1998 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 of 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.”
From providing oil to fibre to food, coconut is India’s ‘wish-fulfilling’ tree
Posted on May 10th, 2023
If there is a lesson every primary school child in India is taught, it is that the tall-standing coconut palm found in abundance in India’s coastal regions is a gift of nature like none other.
Often described as a ‘kalpavriksha’ or a wish-fulling tree, every part of it, from the fruit and leaves to the husk and shell of the nut, is capable of providing sustenance to humans in one way or another. And that is exactly what the coconut has been doing for thousands of years in India.
It is no wonder then that the coconut occupies a central place in Indian culture, especially in Hinduism where many rituals and poojas are incomplete without the presence of the dried coconut, whole or broken.
But perhaps just as important is its place in India’s agri-economy.
Coconut growing and allied industries provide food and livelihood security to over 12 million Indians. To put it simply, India is the world’s Coconut Central. There is none to beat India when it comes to the production of coconuts. In 2021-2022, it produced a total of 19,247 millions nuts or roughly 31% of the world’s coconuts.
Its productivity too is among the highest in the world at 9,123 nuts per hectare, bettering both Indonesia and the Philippines, the two other top coconut growing countries. In India, three states, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, alone produce over 80 percent of the output.
Coconut is consumed in many forms. The tender, green coconut is much sought after for its refreshing and nutritious water and its sweet and soft flesh. The ripe coconut when grated and ground is the mainstay of cuisines from the South, especially Kerala where it is used widely in all kinds of preparations. Then there are various other forms in which the coconut finds its way into food such as coconut milk, desiccated coconut, coconut sugar, dried coconut or copra etc.
Other than its direct use in food, the coconut produced in India goes towards three major industries — copra production, coconut oil extraction and coir making. Coconut oil is extracted from copra and used in cooking as well as in cosmetics like soaps, shampoos and lotions.
Coconut husk is used for coir-making, which supports a large industry that makes various products such as mats, mattress, textiles, yarn and so on. Coconut shell is used in handicrafts and as a source of biofuel.
India also is also among the world’s top coconut exporters, sending out coconuts and other products derived from it to more than 140 countries. The export of Indian coconuts and coconut-related products is growing at a fast pace — exports grew at 41% over the previous year in 2021-22— earning India over Rs 3,236 crore.
The coconut true to its reputation will continue to remain a source of livelihood and sustenance to many in the years to come as well.
‘There is no onion deficiency in India, only a lack of vision and management’
Posted on May 2nd, 2023
Onion is India’s most politically sensitive crop. Any increase in its retail price is a nightmare for politicians. Why is that so? India, an onion surplus nation, cannot make money in exports even when there is a global shortage. The Plate’s TR Vivek spoke to Nanasaheb Patil who perhaps knows more about onions than anyone else. He is an onion farmer himself and a member of the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee or APMC at what is known as Asia’s biggest onion market at Lasalgaon in Maharashtra’s Nashik district.
Q1
Give us a sense of India’s onion production cycle.
Onion is a commodity that is part of India’s daily diet. The first crop of fresh onions arrive in August from Karnataka, starting from Bangalore and Hubli. The supply then shifts gradually north: Kolhapur in September, Nashik by October. This lasts till January or February end. The August-to-February cycle brings red onions that are more perishable. They have shelf life of 2-3 weeks. From late February and early March, the pink onions from Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan start coming in. Fresh arrival lasts until April end. After April, there is no new production until August. The pink onions can be stored for six months. But it depends on climatic conditions. Our traditional storage methods cannot prevent rotting of onions due to high levels of humidity. Supply is maintained during the next four months by storing the March-April pink onion crop.
Q2
What is the demand and supply situation of onions? How much do we produce and what is our consumption?
Our total production is 30 million tonnes per year. Our domestic need is about 15 million tonnes. We process a small quantity into paste and powder and export 1.5 million tonnes. Where does the rest of it go? There is considerable loss since onion is a perishable commodity. Losses are anywhere between 15% and 40%.
There is no shortage of onions, but India lacks a proper management system. Since this is a very climate sensitive crop, average productivity goes up significantly when the climate is good and it is not even 10 per cent of the average when the climate is poor. Due to this, the onion trade sees many ups and downs.
Moreover, the government’s export policy is also not stable. We need ambassadors at our foreign embassies who can speak on behalf of Indian agriculture to other countries. This has become necessary since our production has gone up significantly. We grow a surplus of cereals as well as horticultural crops. There are many other commodities that can be exported, but it needs proper management and vision so that Indian agriculture can get a better market globally.
Q3
What is the problem with our onion export policy? Why does the government ban exports at the slightest hint of a retail price increase? Isn’t that unfair to onion farmers?
There is a psychological factor at work in onion pricing. We are scared of shortage. When the retail prices of onions increase and the media makes it a big issue, the government feels pressured to act. Export is immediately banned. The media, government and consumers need to understand why prices go up. When there is less production of onions due to poor weather conditions prices are bound to go up. People have to understand this. This is accepted about other commodities, why not in the case of onions? I frankly don’t know.
Q4
What is the impact of these knee-jerk export bans? Does India lose credibility in the international markets because of these export bans?
In a global world, countries are free to import commodities from any that can assure them of good quality and regular supply. We have no policy to help our exporters. Our governments are only concerned that there should be no backlash from domestic consumers. Therefore their knee-jerk actions damage our export policies and the overall conditions for exports.
Q5
Let’s say a farmer sells his onions in Lasalgaon at Rs 15 a kilo. By the time it reaches Delhi or Chennai, what is the retail price?
There are many factors that decide the price of onions by the time it reaches the consumer. For example, loading, labour, sorting, packing and transportation. There is a commission for all these activities. Costs increase at each stage of the handling process. All this means that there is a four-fold price increase in the final price of onions from the time the farmer sells his crop.
India No.1: Turmeric, the golden allrounder spice
Posted on May 2nd, 2023
Turmeric or haldi is a hard to beat multi-tasker in Indian homes. It is used extensively in Indian cooking; is an essential ingredient in home remedies for colds, coughs and cuts; is beneficial in skincare and a staple of many Hindu religious ceremonies. Poojas and special occasions, especially marriages, are incomplete without this ‘auspicious’ yellow root, its powder and paste.
Given how integral turmeric is to Indian life, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that India is the world’s No.1 producer, consumer and exporter of the spice. India produces 80% of all turmeric grown in the world, much of it for domestic consumption.
Curcuma longa, as turmeric known botanically, is native to the South Asian region, perhaps even India. It finds mentions in the Vedas as well as in old Tamil literature. Its use dates back 4,000 years.
The yellow in turmeric comes from curcumin, a chemical compound that is supposed to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Although many experts agree on turmeric’s supportive role in the treatment of conditions such as arthritis and mood disorders, large scientific studies of turmeric’s medical benefits aren’t available yet.
Ayurveda, for its part, accords it an important place in the treatment of many ailments, especially in boosting overall health. And it is as an immunity booster that turmeric has today found popularity in many parts of the world, especially during the COVID 19 pandemic. In the health food circuit, ’Turmeric lattes’, as haldi ka doodh is referred to now, are all the rage.
Indian production has kept pace with the increase in demand for turmeric. There has been a steady increase in acreage, up from 231,637 hectares in 2017-2018 to 349,642 hectares in 2021-22. Maharashtra, Telangana and Karnataka are the top turmeric producers.
Lakadong turmeric from Meghalaya is considered the best turmeric in the world with the highest curcumin content of over 7%. In 2021-22, India produced around 1.33 million tons of turmeric, up from 0.86 million tons in 2017-2018.
Indian turmeric exports too have been growing. The country’s exports grew a whopping 42% in the first six months of 2020-21 alone. Exports for 2021-22 are at around 1.53 lakh tonnes up from 1.1 lakh tonnes in 2017-18. Turmeric ranks third after chilli and jeera when it comes to India’s spice exports.
India No.1: Mango country
Posted on April 13th, 2023
If there is one fruit that immediately comes to mind when we think of India, it is the mango. The botanical name for mango, mangifera indica, is a nod to its birthplace, the region around Myanmar and north eastern India where the fruit is supposed to have originated. Not just that, the word ‘mango’ is a derivative of the Tamil and Malayalam ‘mangai/manga’, adopted by Portuguese traders coming to India in the 15th Century for the spice trade.
Mangoes have been cultivated in India for over 4,000 years. It’s not surprising then that it’s far more than just a fruit in the Indian subcontinent. It is a part and parcel of life. Not just something to be eaten and relished alone, it has found its way into poetry and literature, religion and art, culture, and even pop culture!
Sweet connection
Mango leaves adorn the doorways of many Hindu homes and the shape of the mango has become integral to the Indian visual art lexicon. The shape of the mango can be found in sculpture, architecture and textiles. Just think of the quintessential paisley shape so commonly found on saree borders and other apparel.
Mango permeates all aspects of Indian life, not least of which is food itself. Mango-based recipes abound, whether sweet or savoury ranging from chutneys, pickles and relishes to halwas, barfis and aamras or juices. There are other foods where mango is used either as the souring agent (amchur) or the main ingredient (mango rice, mango pachadi etc.)
And yet, if you ask the average Indian what their most favourite way of eating mango is, chances are that you will hear that they love it just as it is. Ripe and ready to be devoured whole with the skin on or without it.
Great variety
Given this love affair with the mango, is it any surprise that India is the world’s number one producer of mango and also its top consumer? India grows about half of the world’s mangoes—it grew about 21 million tonnes in 2022. The biggest mango-growing states are Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. While India is home to a mind-boggling 1,000 varieties of the fruit both wild and cultivated, a few varieties dominate in the market.
There is the alphonso, which is considered the king of mangoes, and is among the most exported varieties. Other popular mango varieties are kesar, langra, chausa and dussheri. But this is a far from exhaustive list. There is a mango for each region in India and each could quite legitimately lay claim to being the best and tastiest.
Unrealised potential
Despite all the mango mania, India does not export a lot of the fruit. It exported just 28,000 tonnes of fresh mangoes in 2021-22. The Middle East accounts for most of these exports. But India could emerge as a big mango exporter to the European Union in the coming years according to a recent report of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.