If only all of India can be like Amul!

All through my growing up years, dairy milk was always in short supply.  To make it worse, whatever we did get was of low quality.  Our neighbor in Neyveli, the industrial town where I did all my K-12 schooling, often used a lactometer to test the quality of the milk delivered by Pandurangan, and was always upset by the the readings that indicated dilution with water.

In Sengottai--my grandmother's place--it was worse.  In the summer days that I have spent there, I have gone chasing after the sounds of the milkman on his bicycle worried that it will all be sold out before it was my turn.

It is not that everyone drank a whole lot of milk.  Very little of it was consumed as milk or used in coffee and tea.  Most of it was to make yogurt (curd) from which butter was churned as well.

But then, things changed.  And they changed fast.

In Madras, where we had moved to during my college days, we walked or bicycled a couple of blocks to the milk-vending machine.  In Sengottai, all I had to do was walk a little more than half-a-mile from grandma's home to the dairy cooperative to buy all the milk I ever wanted.  All of a sudden, my parts of India became the land of milk (and, thereby, sweets!)

Now, when I visit India, whether it is Madras (which is now Chennai) or Sengottai, milk is available a lot more than water is.

All thanks to one man: Verghese Kurien.  He died, ninety wonderful years old.

His work in transforming perennial shortage into full and plenty is a classic example of how economic activities are shackled by India's awful dirigisme.  As noted in this piece:

Before Kurien came on the scene, the task of dairy development was being handled by the milk commissioners of the State. The Government milk schemes soon found that it was easy to use cheap imported milk in urban areas. These milk schemes in Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta started with good intentions. To start with, they procured milk at prevailing prices and sold it at market prices. As producer prices rose, consumer prices needed to be raised. It was cheaper to bring in imported milk powder to keep urban prices low. India became dependent on imported milk powder, and the urban market was destroyed for rural milk producers.

The milk commissioners became ones with vested interest in the sector. Kurien then said that there were no milk commissioners in Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand, but there was plenty of milk there. His theory was that you could either have milk or milk commissioners.

Kurien was able to get rid of the commissioners and unleashed the abilities of millions of dairy farmers.  It is by no means a stretch to argue that economic progress in India would have been truly astounding without the various shackles that the government uses. 

Kurien carefully cultivated the brand identity as well.  A brand that is recognized in India for quality, with consumers confident that they would be served with nothing but the best.

In the late 1950s, Mr. Kurien decided to market the produce of the cooperative through a brand name, and that led to the creation of one of the most enduring Indian brands — Amul Butter. Amul’s billboard advertisements, which play on current affairs, are a parallel historical record of modern India. So endearing is the brand that even The Times of India, which does not grant any corporation free mileage on its editorial pages and even blurs images of company logos in its editorial photographs, carries images of Amul’s billboards when the brand is in the news. Mr. Kurien’s obituary was, inescapably, accompanied by the images of Amul’s billboards in several newspapers.  

Amul's ads are often playful and I have always wondered how much of that was orchestrated by Kurien.  Will end this with Amul's homage (ht) to the late Dr. Verghese Kurien.