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Our Corporate Bureau
Mumbai, Oct 17: An era in the Indian cooperative movement has ended. Varghese Kurien, 77, the man behind the `Milk Revolution,' has announced his retirement as chairman of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), Anand.
According to a press release, the successor to Kurien is likely to be Amrita Patel, who is currently the managing director of NDDB.
Kurien's retirement brings to an end a long innings played in strengthening the rural economy of the country. He pioneered the `White Revolution' in India when NDDB started replication of Anand Pattern of Milk Cooperatives in the late sixties. Kurien's 33-year-long association with NDDB and a 50-year-long dedication to the milk cooperatives has been successful in enabling India to emerge as the largest producer of milk in the world today.
This has been made possible by the concerted efforts of the NDDB wherein the milk produced by millions of poor milk producers in lakhs of villages has been channeled to modern processing plants through producer-owneddairy cooperatives. This has benefited consumers immensely with milk and milk products being made available at affordable prices.
Further, NDDB has not wavered from its task and has faced the might of multinational giants like Hindustan Lever and Brittania. Even today, NDDB continues to play a pivotal role in the dairy development of the country. There are 10 million milk producer families organised into 75,000 village cooperatives owning 170 modern cooperative dairy plants which are organised under 22 state marketing federations.
The network produces 12 million litres of milk a day and markets processed milk and milk products in all cities and towns of India. Over 150 million rupees are paid to rural milk producers on a daily basis for their produce by these cooperatives.
Milk, in that matter, is considered to be the most valued agricultural commodity, even surpassing wheat, rice, oilseeds and other agricultural crops.
Amrita Patel, who is expected to succeed Kurien, has been associated with NDDB forover 38 years and has pursued the mission of the Board relentlessly under Kurien.
However, there is some confusion as to whether the government would consider appointing a bureaucrat instead. The thinking stems from the fact that this is perhaps the only industry where the cooperatives dominate the market against competition from MNCs and other private firms. It is thus feared that given a chance MNCs would like to destabilise the cooperative dairy industry and capture the large market for their products, and thus the demand for a head who has the required experience and enjoys the confidence of the milk producers.
Kurien has been under pressure in the past to retain his place at the top of the organisation he literally built with his hands, but he always came through such controversial moves to replace him almost entirely on the strength of the unrelenting support that he got from the common people connected with the NDDB movement, especially the dairy farmers all over the country. Two years ago, thegovernment tried a sudden move to replace Kurien, but the effort fizzled out as dairy farmers around the country protested and even blockaded the NDDB office.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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