Verghese Kurien

Verghese was a young engineer posted to a tiny dairy in Anand, a village in Gujarat, and he didn't want to be there. But he stayed to help farmers who were being cheated by middlemen.

He taught them to run their own cooperative — Amul — which soon collected milk from millions of families twice a day. Then he took the idea across India in a plan called Operation Flood, and turned India from a milk-short country into the world's biggest milk producer.

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) was born in Kozhikode, Kerala, and trained as a mechanical engineer at Loyola College and Michigan State University. In 1949 he was posted to a government creamery in Anand, Gujarat, where he met Tribhuvandas Patel and joined the fledgling Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union — which became Amul.

As founding chairman of the National Dairy Development Board (1965) he launched Operation Flood in 1970, a three-phase programme that linked 700+ dairy cooperatives to city markets through a national 'milk grid'. India's milk production rose from ~20 million tonnes in 1970 to over 100 million tonnes by 2000, and India became the world's largest milk producer.

Kurien also founded IRMA (Institute of Rural Management, Anand). He was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award (1963), Padma Vibhushan (1999) and the World Food Prize (1989).