The milkman goes

Verghese Kurien first talked of retirement a quarter century ago, when he was approaching 60. His departure on Monday has therefore been long overdue, and it is sad that it should have been precipitated finally by a revolt by colleagues. Always feisty, ever intent on having his own way, and never shy of getting into a scrap, the father of India's milk revolution has in recent years been at loggerheads with board colleagues not just at the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (whose chairmanship he has just given up), but also at the Institute of Rural Management (where he tried to sack the director and locked out fellow-directors from a board meeting), while indulging in a prolonged slanging match with his handpicked successor at the National Dairy Development Board, Amrita Patel. None of this is out of character, but that does not make any of it necessary. Having done enough and more to fill more than one lifetime, and to merit all the recognition, awards and even adulation that have come his way, Dr Kurien should have gone quietly and gracefully, instead of waiting to be pushed out.

As ever, India's milkman staked his ground on an issue of principle""which is that farmers' cooperatives should be run by farmers, not taken over by bureaucrats or anyone else. This has been the issue on which he has fought numerous battles in the past, and the reason why he was never seduced by New Delhi and made a wayside town in Gujarat the country's milk capital. But it is also true that, in the name of being the farmers' servant, Dr Kurien was as autocratic as they come""reflecting a pattern familiar in many joint stock companies. The difference between him and many others is of course that he also built institutions, not one but several; he emphasised quality and performance; he was an intense nationalist, out to prove that an Indian company could do everything the global corporations did; and at no stage was he attracted to personal rewards, other than the weakness of always wanting his own way.

His legacy is that India is no longer plagued by milk shortages and the milk rationing that was common in the cities when he launched Operation Flood in 1970. His legacy is also a large and well-organised business, with several brands as household names (Amul is only one of them). Indeed, the conceptualisation of Operation Flood was itself a brilliant way of turning a threat (gifted imports of Europe's surplus milk powder that would have depressed the domestic market) into a financing mechanism for using the gifts to get the milk revolution under way. The first phase of the programme did not, in fact, meet most of its targets, but Dr Kurien was convinced about the viability of the idea and launched a second, larger second phase that eventually paid off. It is therefore a tribute also to his staying power and ability to ride out the rough patches. The extension of the same ideas into vegetable oils led to less dramatic results, but caused a display of the same autocratic tendencies. In the end, though, the country should be grateful to Dr Kurien for what he has done to benefit millions of dairy farmers and the many more millions of consumers of milk and milk products.