November | Thursday | 26, 2015 :: Google celebrates the 94th birth anniversary of Verghese Kurien with a doodle. Kurien’s ‘White Revolution’ gave India the identity of being the largest producer of milk in the world. Kurien was also the man behind the creation and success of ‘Amul’ which deals with a multitude of dairy products.
The Doodle shows the ‘milkman of India’ with a can in his hand as a buffalo looks on. Kurien’s revolutionary ideas lead to a self-sustaining dairy industry in India.
Verghese Kurien (26 November 1921 – 9 September 2012) was an Indian social entrepreneur known as the “Father of the White Revolution” for his Operation Flood, the world’s largest agricultural development programme. This transformed India from a milk-deficient nation to the world’s largest milk producer, surpassing the United States of America in 1998, with about 17 percent of global output in 2010–11, which in 30 years doubled milk available to every person. Dairy farming became India’s largest self-sustaining industry. He made the country self-sufficient in edible oils too later on, taking the powerful and entrenched oil supplying lobby, head-on.He founded around 30 institutions of excellence (like AMUL, GCMMF, IRMA, NDDB) which are owned, managed by farmers and run by professionals. As the founding chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), Kurien was responsible for the creation and success of the Amul brand of dairy products. A key achievement at Amul was the invention of milk powder processed from buffalo milk (abundant in India), as opposed to that made from cow-milk, in the then major milk producing nations. This led Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to appoint him the founder-chairman of National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in 1965, to replicate Amul’s “Anand model” nationwide. He is regarded as one of the greatest proponents of the cooperative movement in the world, his work having lifted millions out of poverty in India, and outside.
Kurien was born on 26 November 1921 at Kozhikode, Kerala into a Syrian Christian family. His father was a civil surgeon. He did his schooling in Diamond Jubilee Higher Secondary School in Gobichettipalayam while his father worked as a civil surgeon at Gobichettipalayam Government Hospital. He graduated in Physics from Loyola College, Madras in 1940 and then obtained his Bachelors in Mechanical engineering from the College of Engineering, Guindy affiliated to University of Madras. After completing his degree, he joined the Tata Steel Technical Institute, Jamshedpur from where he graduated in 1946. Subsequently, he went to the United States on a Government of India scholarship to earn a Master of Science in Metallurgical Engineering (Distinction) from Michigan State University in 1948.
