Verghese Kurien, India's 'milk man' passes away

Zebra

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Father of white revolution Dr Verghese Kurien dies

Agencies : Anand (Gujarat), Sun Sep 09 2012, 09:31 hrs

The father of 'white revolution' Dr Verghese Kurien, who transformed India from a milk-deficient country to the world's largest milk producer, passed away early today at Muljibhai Patel Urological Hospital in neighbouring Nadiad, after a brief illness.....

Father of white revolution Dr Verghese Kurien dies - Indian Express
 

balai_c

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Re: Father of white revolution Dr Verghese Kurien dies

Wow, really a great man has passed away! An immeasurable loss to the country. Sad day for India.One of my heroes.
 

trackwhack

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He changed the way I thought. Inspired me more than any other Indian. True, unconditional service offered to those who needed it at a pittance.
 

Daredevil

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Great man, great revolution who touched many lives. You will be remembered.
 

Yusuf

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RIP sir! Thank you Sir for what you did and you will be an inspiration amid the ruins of the system that we see all round these days.
 

Razor

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I love milk. Thank you, Mr Kurien for all you have done to the people.
 

Tolaha

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Amul's Verghese Kurien: Born in Kerala, made in Gujarat. Now Greek part - Page2 - The Economic Times

He's the father of India's White Revolution, alright, but Verghese Kurien has also been an early bird among the multitude of Kuriens from Kerala who've made the name popular across the country.

Kurien's tale in Anand may be inked in milk, but the surname he carries has some Greek in it as well. The name has its root in the Greek 'kyrios', meaning master, Lord, power or authority, from which comes the word 'kyriakos', meaning 'of the Lord'. The 'Cyriacus' name in Ancient Rome is considered the equivalent of the Greek 'Kyriakos', and both these names may have come to Kerala via Syria and through the multiple trade relations that the state had with European nations. Over a couple of thousand years, Kerala has a legion of Kuriakoses, Cyriacs, Kuriens and Kurians, which are different versions of the name with the kyriakos root. And they may all owe a bit of their name's popularity to Amul Kurien, who left Kerala in his teens and made that surname as popular in the PMO in Jawaharlal Nehru's time, as with the small-time dairy farmers of Anand, Gujarat.
 

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‘Kurien’s genius and his faith in farmers made Manthan possible’ - Indian Express

Dr Kurien asked me to make a film on Operation Flood and I made two films on it. The idea of Manthan came from the research on Operation Flood.

I told me, "You and I may like these documentaries but it's highly unlikely that we'll show it to people. We need a feature film to get the word out. I'll need money to make a feature film." He wanted to know what budget I'd be comfortable with, I said about Rs 10 lakh. He asked farmers who came to Anand centres to give Rs 2 each and thus made them all producers of the film. In the publicity material, we had every farmer's name. Manthan had half-a-million producers. It was Dr Kurien's genius and his faith in farmers that made Manthan possible. Once Manthan was ready we met with a very non-enthusiastic response from distributors. Dr Kurien invited our half-a-million producers with their families to the first screening of Manthan. Hoards of farmers came in trucks to see the film that they helped produce in a cinema hall. It created the right buzz and distributors got the faith to release the film. Another striking aspect of Manthan was the famous Preeti Sagar song, Maro Gaam Katha Parey, which was later used in Amul advertisements.
 

thakur_ritesh

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A great service rendered by Mr Kurien and GCMMF to the country, to the sub-continent and to the African continent, an example that was to be emulated right across.
 

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Business Line : Opinion : The man who empowered through milk

There was nobody more unsuitable to have earned the sobriquet 'Milkman from Anand'.

Verghese Kurien — who passed away in the early hours of Sunday aged 90 — was a Syrian Christian from Kerala, who, before landing for the first time in Anand on an early May morning of 1949, knew it just as a place "somewhere near Bombay".

That Anand was almost 500 km away from Mumbai was something he discovered only after reaching there as a 27-year-old, to work as superintendent of a run-down government creamery on a monthly salary of Rs 275.

Moreover, the man who endeared himself to Gujarat's farmers and created a brand called 'Amul' for the milk they produced, never spoke Gujarati (though he once told me that he fully understood the language; not speaking it was a deliberate strategy he employed to know what others were saying without their realising it).

Also, as someone who was a self-proclaimed atheist, a meat-eater and not particularly averse to alcohol, there couldn't have been anybody more removed from the puritan Vaishnav-Jain traditions of Gujarat.
Kurien was originally a mechanical engineer from Chennai's Guindy College of Engineering, who in the early 1940s worked with Tata Steel or TISCO as it used to be.

He left the job only because TISCO was being headed by a maternal granduncle, John Mathai, who later also became India's Finance Minister.

Being known as the grand-nephew of TISCO's top boss was rather stifling for a young, independent-minded man.

So, when he got a government scholarship to study in the US, Kurien chucked the job. It did not matter that the scholarship was only to do a masters in dairy engineering and not his first choice of metallurgical engineering.

On returning from Michigan State University in 1948, Kurien had a Rs 1,000-per-month job offer from Union Carbide in Kolkata, which he could, however, not take up because of a two-year government employment bond that was part of the scholarship deal.

And the creamery in the boondocks of Gujarat's Kheda/Charotar region was where Kurien got posted.
THE TRIBHUVANDAS EFFECT

It was in Anand that Kurien encountered the man who changed his life: Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel.
 

parijataka

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Re: Father of white revolution Dr Verghese Kurien dies

Kurien didn't drink milk, he lived it

Verghese Kurien, who never drank milk but transformed a milk-deficient country into the world's top producer of the universal symbol of nutrition, passed away on Sunday morning aged 90. He left behind wife Molly and daughter Nirmala.

The architect of India's White Revolution and Operation Flood of the 1970s had been suffering from kidney disease. He died at the Muljibhai Patel Urological Hospital in Nadiad town near Gujarat's Anand, his home for the past 63 years, at 1.15am, a statement released by a former aide said.

Kurien will have a memorial erected to him in Anand, from where he headed the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, which markets the brand Amul, and the National Dairy Development Board for decades, Amul chairman Ramsinh Parmar said.

Born into a Syrian Christian family in Calicut in November 1921, Kurien was sent to Anand in 1949 as a young dairy engineer under a bond, which he had to sign when he travelled to the US to study on a government scholarship. The bond period was over in months but Kurien stayed back for his entire life.

He was cremated according to Hindu rites at Anand this evening in keeping with a wish he had expressed to his daughter, Parmar said.

President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh joined chief ministers and governors in paying tribute.

In a condolence message to Kurien's wife, Singh said Kurien's "contribution to the welfare of the farmer and agricultural production and development of the country is immeasurable. Kurien was an icon of India's cooperative movement and the dairy industry".

Kurien had dedicated his professional life to empowering the Indian farmer through co-operatives. His main contribution was in designing systems and institutions that enabled people to develop themselves.

He played a key role in creating Amul, which broke the local trade cartel 65 years ago and paved the way for the dairy co-operative sector to flourish in Gujarat.

Amul, which started out with just two village dairy co-operative societies and 247 litres of milk, has grown to become a Rs 11,668-crore brand with milk collection of 3.88 billion litres in 2011-12.

Kurien was the first to produce milk powder from buffalo milk at a time the rest of the world manufactured powder solely from cow's milk. Under his charge, India's milk production increased from 20 million tonnes a year in the 1960s to 122 million tonnes in 2011.

Kurien had served as head of the National Dairy Development Board from 1965 to 1998 and the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation from 1973 to 2006, but his departure from the latter was forced by former loyalists who had turned against him.

He resigned in March 2006 to pre-empt the board of directors from ousting him. Three months later, he read the writing on the wall and quit as chairman of the Institute of Rural Management in Anand, which he had headed since its birth in 1979, before its board could move a no-confidence motion against him.

As the milk industry grew and private players and multinationals entered the sector, Kurien had become fiercely protective of the cooperative movement and Amul. Others, such as his onetime protege Amrita Patel, the National Dairy Development Board chairperson, wanted to corporatise the cooperative sector and enter into joint ventures with other state federations.

Kurien was vehemently opposed to this. Matters came to a head after a very public fight between him and Amrita.

Sources said the battle within the milk marketing federation was fuelled by the BJP, which wanted to wrest the state's milk unions from the Congress. The BJP was desperate to get into the cooperative sector and was working hard to oust Kurien.

This became evident when a Narendra Modi loyalist and former schoolteacher, Parthi Bhatol, was appointed Kurien's successor. Kurien had been at loggerheads with the chief minister.

Modi today said Kurien's "pioneering work gave the milk revolution, transformed India and touched us all". He termed Kurien's life the perfect example of "one life, one mission".

"Kurien was committed to the farmers' interest," the Amul chairman said. "The only thing he dreamt of all his life was farmers' prosperity."

The Prime Minister said Kurien's "greatest contribution was to give a position of pre-eminence to the farmer and his or her interests rather than those of middlemen". He added that he had personally had a rewarding association with Kurien and benefited from his sagacity and vision.

Kurien had been awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the country's second-highest civilian honour, as well as the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership, the World Food Prize, the Carnegie-Wateler World Peace Prize and the International Person of the Year award from the US.

Paradoxically, he did not drink milk. Kurien used to say: "I do not drink milk as I don't like it."
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