I Too Had a Dream

by Verghese Kurien

If you are always honest to yourself, it does not take much effort in always being honest with others.

failure is not about not succeeding. Rather, it is about not putting in your best effort and not contributing, however modestly, to the common good.

when you work merely for your own profit, the pleasure is transitory; but if you work for others, there is a deeper sense of fulfilment and if things are handled well, the money, too, is more than adequate.

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.

He had the foresight to realise that the dairy could not be run without professionals.

He refers to Tribhuvandas Patel. An organization need right people to accomplish great heights.

Tribhuvandas, Dalaya and I soon came to be known as the Kaira Cooperative’s ‘triumvirate’.

Maniben Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s daughter.

Life to be noted

I was to learn yet another valuable but sad lesson: 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.

We learnt another useful lesson: with adequate support, confrontation at the right time pays off.

One of the earliest lessons I had learnt was that Amul existed because, barely a few hundred kilometres away, Bombay existed. There could be production here only because a market was there.

From the very beginning I was convinced that a cooperative, too, must be a business enterprise and it has to run as a business enterprise. If a cooperative forgets this, it will fail; it will collapse.

along with our freedom we had inherited a bureaucracy, which was designed by the British to rule, not to serve. The British way of doing things had always been to get things done through a government department and after independence we Indians merely continued this system.

It is not that government officials lack ability; it is that they try to achieve development through a structure that is not designed to achieve it.

Foreign investment can only help us in areas where Indian capital, Indian know-how, is not available.

This was when Eustace Fernandes of ASP created the Amul mascot – the mischievous, endearing little girl.

‘Utterly, butterly, delicious’ – which broke all records to become one of the longest-running campaigns in Indian advertising history.

What then was the Kaira Cooperative? It was certainly not only about milk. It was very soon becoming an instrument of social and economic change in our rural system.

true development is not development of a cow or buffalo but development of women and men.

‘whether the rich and fortunate are imaginative enough, and the resentful and underprivileged poor patient enough, to begin to establish a true foundation for better sharing, fuller cooperation and joint planetary work’.

without that professional management the company may never have succeeded.

What use is democracy in Delhi if we do not have democratic institutions at the grass-roots level?

The solitary difference was that Amul dairy was owned by the farmers themselves. The elected representatives from among the farmers managed it. These elected representatives had employed me as a professional manager to run their dairy. I was an employee of the farmers.

the work of government should only be to govern. The government ought not to get into businesses. The government’s rules and regulations were certainly not meant to run dairies; they were meant to administer the country.

‘Mr Ahmed, that is because India is not Pakistan. When your country attacked India, the Collector of Kutch district was a Christian, the IGP in Gujarat was a devout Muslim, the Home Secretary of Gujarat was a Christian and the Governor of Gujarat was a Muslim. That is India for you.’

‘Where cooperation fails, there fails the only hope of rural India’.

the corporate world and the cooperative world are distinctly different. I decided that we would find and employ our own managers and that is what we did.

I have always believed that once you identify the best person for a particular project and tell him or her exactly what you expect, you must put your complete trust in that person, allowing him or her to work independently without interference. If you do, the project is bound to succeed.

There are so many opportunities that pass by and if we do not seize them, they are wasted.

The problem of nutrition in our country, as everyone knows, is not so much of quality but of calories.

We Indians are an extremely intelligent people but we can progress as a nation only when we learn the secret of unleashing this positive power of the people. Whenever this happens it disturbs a lot of people – because they know that a giant is waking up.

The ever-increasing greed of the traders exploited both the farmer and the consumer.

The ultimate motive for our market intervention operations was to ensure that the product from the producer organisations reached the consumers directly.

When farmers join together, begin to cooperate, they are a power to be reckoned with. Therefore,

quite contrary to what Kosygin had advised me, change must take time. Basic social and economic change needs to be brought about gradually and the more carefully and thoughtfully it is effected, the more permanent it will be. Evidently we were doing something very right in our country because over the years many countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America expressed interest in adopting the Anand pattern, sending officials and farmers to learn from our experience.

At NDDB we recognised that one of the biggest problems of Indian agriculture is that it is very difficult to fine-tune the production of an agricultural commodity exactly to match the demand. Production, being dependent on nature, will fluctuate. In such a scenario, it is easy for the traders and businessmen, whose only objective is to make money, to exploit the farmers. That is why the structure that NDDB promoted was a cooperative, non-exploitative structure, which eliminated the greedy people between those who produce the agricultural commodity and those who consume it. We believed that what worked through the Anand pattern with milk would also work for other agricultural commodities.

Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) in 1979.

While integrity and loyalty are core values, there are other values, too,

believe that professionals working in our organisations must have a clarity of thought combined with a passionate pursuit of mastery of their subject.

I also believe that a person who does not have respect for time, and does not have a sense of timing, can achieve little.

The involvement and support of the right people has always been one of the keys to the success of any mission.

have always believed that it is only when you get less than you are worth, that you can look for respect; if you are paid much more than you are worth you will get no respect.

my years at Anand, I worked well in crisis situations. I always felt that one of the best things about being confronted by problems was that you could find solutions to those problems.

‘When you stand above the crowd, you must be ready to have stones thrown at you.’

The dairy cooperatives have managed all this because they have done three crucial things. They have acquired and equipped themselves with the latest and most modern technology for milk processing and product manufacture. Then they have defined the standards necessary to achieve and maintain world-class quality. And, most importantly, they have put in place systems which will ensure that they consistently achieve the standards they have set for themselves.

I have often claimed that I have had but one good idea in my life: that true development is the development of women and men.

Our greatest national resource is our people and too often have we neglected this resource.

Our schools, our health services and many other community programmes would have been far better had communities raised the resources, created the facilities, employed the staff and held them accountable. But sadly, our communities have no say in these.