Revisiting the Amul Model of Social Development

To achieve sustainable development, the main cause of such development should be inherent to that society itself. This paper examines the developmental philosophies of a successful model which had an important social impact and revolutionised India’s milk production. The project was the vision and brainchild of Dr. Verghese Kurien, a dairy engineer by profession. The milk obtained from rural cattle is usually used for subsistence consumption in India with huge unmarketable surplus. The central problem in this case was to supply the perishable commodity obtained from villages to the cities after processing and preservation in a hot tropical country. A cooperative was formed which was democratic in structure and was controlled by the farmers. The cooperatives catered major social objectives as barriers of caste, creed, landholdings and religion were broken down with the common economic objective. Dr. Kurien and his team proposed indigenous technology suitable for Indian conditions. Small producers fed and took care of their milch animals in ways which suits them best. Operation flood did not tamper with the production process of milk. Dr. Kurien is also known for his fight to liberate the cooperatives from archaic legislation to ensure that the producers have the right to control the resources they create. The controls of cooperatives were kept away from the clutches of the bureaucrats or technocrats. The major thrust of Operation Flood program had been to set up a national milk grid which links the rural milk producers to the urban consumers through milk tankers, chilling stations and feeder balancing dairies. The hallmarks of the white revolution are scale, speed and spectacle. Lal Bahadur Sastri, the former Prime Minister of India, had observed that along with developing milk, the project has developed the society in true sense and urged the whole country to replicate the model.