I Too Had a Dream

by Verghese Kurien

Life is a privilege and to waste it would be wrong.

buffaloes give double the milk in winter than in summer.

when the government enters business, the citizens of India get cheated. The greatest repercussion of the government entering into business is that instead of safeguarding people from vested interests, they themselves become the vested interest.

New Zealand, I discovered, was a charming country full of very fine people. Hardly surprising, since most people in New Zealand were farmers and farmers are good-natured people.

Betaa

when Sardar Patel passed away, she picked up a book and a bag that belonged to him and went to meet Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi. She handed them to Nehru, telling him that her father had instructed her that when he died she should give these items to Nehru and no one else. The bag contained Rs 35 lakh that belonged to the Congress Party and the book was the party’s book of accounts.

I asked her what she had expected Nehru to say to her. ‘I thought he might ask me how I would manage now, or at least ask if there was anything he could do to help me. But he never asked,’ she explained. She was extremely disheartened and in a way the incident revealed the extent of strain in the Nehru-Sardar Patel relationship.

that the technical advice of ‘experts’ is all too often dictated by the economic interests of the advanced countries and not by the needs or ground realities in developing countries.

In 1957 Kaira Cooperative registered the brand ‘Amul’ – a word that would soon become a household name.

in the US, the capital of capitalism, 85 per cent of the dairy industry was cooperative. In New Zealand, Denmark and Holland, 100 per cent and in erstwhile West Germany 95 per cent of the dairy industry was cooperative.

he would like to come a day earlier and spend a night in a village as the guest of a farmer – preferably a small farmer in Kaira district.

Pakistani delegate came to me and said: ‘Dr Kurien, my brief was very simple: “Oppose everything that India proposes”. But after you spoke, I simply could not do that. So please understand that my silence is my support.’

audit revealed that of the Rs 200 crore the World Bank invested in Operation Flood, the net return into India’s rural economy was a massive Rs 24,000 crore each year over a period of ten years.

I had to visit the Prime Minister once again and complain: ‘Madam, this is the end. I’m not continuing any more. Since you spoke to him the last time, he has become even more malicious. I cannot carry on like this.’ Indira Gandhi looked at me and said very calmly, ‘Dr Kurien, then I shall remove him.’ And that is exactly what she did. She sacked the Agriculture Minister because he refused to stop interfering in the working of NDDB. Rao Birendra Singh came to know what was in store for him only three days

As I walked out of the Prime Minister’s room, Seshan stuck out his hand to shake mine and later remarked to me that he never knew I was capable of saying such things.

Rajiv Gandhi’s famous statement, about only fifteen paise reaching the bottom when hundred paise are released from the top, said it all.