Amul's Verghese Kurien deserved a Bharat Ratna, if anyone ever did

The milk cooperative movement in India did not begin with V Kurien, it began with a strike by lifestock farmers of Kaira district in 1946 to have the right to supply processed milk to British-controlled Bombay. The movement, most definitely, will continue after him.

What happened in between was the work of genius, and defines Kurien as a true builder of modern India. He built India's first, modern, organised retail chain, linking primary producers to final consumers through a very short, high-tech supply chain that increased income for the producers while lowering cost for the consumer.

He built a vibrant brand, Amul, that resonates so well with Indians as a synonym for quality and fairness that people try to peddle all kinds of products, ranging from underwear to toothpaste, using that brand. Kurien demonstrated that an Indian brand can challenge and beat haloed multinationals in branding and in established product segments (ice cream, in Amul's case).

His endeavour to scale up the Gujarat cooperative success to the rest of the country, Operation Flood, made India the largest producer of milk in the world (of course, per head of cattle, India's yield remains poor). He demonstrated the viability of the cooperative form of organising production in achieving three vital goals. Goal number one, deploy the most modern agro-processing technology.

Two, conduct all the stages of value addition that the farmer's produce undergoes before reaching the final consumer, such as processing into different products, packaging, storage and transportation, branding and marketing, retail distribution.


Three: capture the value so generated for the farmers themselves. By meeting these goals through cooperatives and their federations, he demonstrated how farmers can summon sufficient bargaining power vis-a-vis large corporate entities.

Amul could take off in Gujarat thanks to its good network of rural roads, without which a number of trucks could not have collected sufficient milk from a large enough number of farmer centres to make a processing plant viable. He took on multinationals. For Kurien's magic to work in the rest of rural India, rural roads and power have to work their miracle first.

-ET




Dr Verghese Kurien — From mechanical engineer to milkman

 
Dr Verghese Kurien, who came to be known as the Milkman of India, began his career as a mechanical engineer. But later he turned to dairy engineering and became the architect of the world’s largest dairy development programme, Operation Flood.


He dedicated his life to the welfare of Gujarat’s cattle owners and turned the state’s dairy co-operative sector into one of the most successful cooperative models in the world. Dr Kurien’s strategy for the sector ensured that private multinational dairy companies, such as Nestle, could never capture a big share of the Indian market. The defeat of dairy multinationals at the hands of a little-known cooperative of Gujarat woke up the world which began studying Kurien’s experiment with the aim of replicating it.



Born on November 26, 1921 at Kozhikode in Kerala, Dr Kurien graduated with a degree in physics from Loyola College, Madras in 1940. He also did his bachelors in mechanical engineering from Madras University.


For a brief period, he worked at Tata Iron and Steel Company in Jamshedpur. Then he got the Indian government’s scholarship to study dairy engineering.






After receiving specialised training in dairy engineering at the Imperial Institute of Animal Husbandry and Dairying in Bangalore, Dr Kurien went to the US where he earned a Masters degree in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University in 1948. For his Masters degree too, he had taken dairy engineering as a minor subject.






On his return to India from the US in 1948, Dr Kurien joined the Indian government’s dairy department. In May 1949, he was appointed dairy engineer at Government Research Creamery, a milk powder factory, in Anand.






Today private dairies are in awe of Amul’s name but in the 1950s, the newly-formed cooperative dairy, Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union Limited, was struggling for survival against Polson Dairy, a giant in the sector.






Kurien took Kaira milk union’s struggle as a challenge and left his secure government job. He joined hands with Tribhuvandas Patel, the then chairman of Kaira union to set up a processing plant. Together, they created the Anand Milk Union Ltd (Amul).






-DNAINDIA







Verghese Kurien: Thank you for the utterly butterly movement




He was a tiger of a man, Dr Verghese Kurien. He took on politicians with no fear. And all prime ministers, irrespective of political ideology, knew that this was a man with a great vision and unique valour.




All of them were unanimous in one decision- that he needed to be supported.




I remember once asking him who he felt our finest Prime Minister was. His answer was immediate: "Indira Gandhi. She was mentally very tough."

He was the Robin Hood of the Indian milkman. And more than just a client to my father when he started his advertising agency, daCunha Associates.

The day my father requested Dr Kurien that he give the ad agency a free hand, since the topical nature of the Amul billboard campaign required quick decisions and turnaround time, he obliged, no questions asked.

A sanction that truly requires trust. And a sanction that has lasted to this day. To know that you have the full backing of a client when you set out to create ads for a brand is a hugely satisfying, reassuring feeling.

I first met Dr Kurien when I was six. My father had been handling the Amul account since 1966.

On my sixth birthday, Dr Kurien, who by now was also a family friend, said that he had a special present for me. I went to his home in Gujarat and there, on the dining table, was a large, carefully wrapped gift.

I dived into the unearthing of this massive present with all the vitality and expectation of a six-year-old, unpeeling it gradually like an oversized onion. Thirty minutes and many layers of paper later, at the bottom of this huge box lay the pot of gold - a silver foil wrapped cube of Amul Cheese.

Dr Kurien looked at me, a twinkle in his eye, and said, "It is a special present, right?"

Couldn't argue with that.

Yes, for all his mental toughness, this was a man with a fab sense of humour.

Cut to 1998. One morning, we ran a hoarding lampooning the then-president of the BCCI. 'Dalmiya kuch kaala hai?', we asked cheekily.

The gent in question was furious and threatened to slap a defamation suit on Dr Kurien personally.

I got a phone call from Dr Kurien asking what exactly we had shown. I explained and then asked him if he'd like us to remove the hoarding.

"Not on your life," he thundered and even suggested we create a fresh visual that is unprintable in this newspaper!

Dr Kurien was a fearless man with a wicked sense of humour.

What more can one ask of a client and a man.

RIP, Dr K And thank you for the cube of Amul cheese. You are utterly, butterly great, sir.




-HT


‘Kurien strode like a titan across the bureaucratic barriers and obstacles’


Verghese Kurien, despite spending over six decades in Gujarat, knew little Gujarati. But he still had excellent interaction with farmers. He graduated from Loyola College and joined the Guindy College of Engineering, both in Chennai. He underwent specialised training at the Imperial Institute of Animal Husbandry and Dairying in Bangalore and went to the Michigan State University in the United States on a Government of India scholarship to complete his Masters’ degree in mechanical engineering, with dairy engineering as a minor subject. He completed it in 1948.


Kurien was assigned a job at the Government Creamery at Anand in Gujarat to serve for the bond period. He completed the period and got the release order from the Government Creamery, but remained bonded to Anand.


Sardar Valabhbhai Patel had assigned him the task of solving the problems of the farmers in his constituency, Kaira, whenever the Home Minister received a representation from poor farmers.


After Sardar Patel, it was another “Patel” who tied Kurien to Anand. At the request of Tribhuvandas Patel, who had undertaken a mission, at the behest of Sardar Patel, to free the poor farmers and milk producers from the clutches of Polson, a powerful multinational company, Kurien joined the Anand Milk Union Limited (AMUL) in 1949.


No one knew then that the seeds were sown for a huge tree that would later spread its branches all over India and fragrance worldwide.


AMUL later made way for a larger milk-producing project, the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers Union, and still later the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation. But it never lost sight of the original brand — AMUL — which is today a household name all over the country; people have come to identify milk and milk products with AMUL.


Shastri’s request


The success of the AMUL experiment attracted the then Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri. He requested Kurien to help him replicate the AMUL model across the country. And the National Dairy Development Board was born in 1965 with the famous “milkman” as its founder-chairman.


As Kurien was unwilling to leave Anand, the tiny town was made the headquarters of one of the largest central sector boards.


Though power changed hands at the Centre, no succeeding government ever changed Kurien, who served at the NDDB for a record 33 years before handing over the baton to his one-time protégé Amrita Patel in 1998, albeit following some differences over the “corporatisation” of the cooperative movement.


“Promoting and establishing close to 1.50 lakh village cooperatives, with over 15 million members, and leading India to become the largest milk producer in the world, was no mean feat,” said Dr. Amrita Patel, acknowledging Kurien’s achievements during the period when, post-Independence, India was in its infancy, and the cooperative movement almost unheard of among the rural masses, who were subjected to exploitation by middlemen.


Not only the NDDB, Kurien also was the pioneer-founder of the Institute of Rural Management (IRMA), Anand, in 1979, which still is the only institute of its kind in the country providing management training in rural technologies.


Kurien remained the chairman of the IRMA till 2006, the year he also gave up the chairmanship of the GCMMF, which he was heading since 1973, both due to old-age and some controversies over his alleged “style of functioning.” All the institutions he founded and headed remained based in Anand as the powerful milkman could fend off all bureaucratic and political misadventures to claw into the rural turf.


“He strode like a titan across the bureaucratic barriers and obstacles that, at every stage of the NDDB’s history, could have brought it to its knees. But undaunted, he stood staunchly against the machinations of all those who beheld his achievement with envy and were affronted by the sheer tenacity of the man. By his example, he has taught us to act with courage when faced with those who oppose the interests of our nation and the farmers,” Dr. Amrita Patel said.


From milk, Kurien also ventured into cooperatives dealing in oil and oilseeds, vegetables and fruits — the later, albeit, with limited success.


According to GCMMF managing director R.S. Sodhi, “his was a life devoted to the Indian farmers and through them to the people of the country at large. After being sidelined by powerful political interests who connived to ease him out, for he would not allow them to meddle in his domain, Kurien still remained the quintessential milkman of India who lived a simple life in a modest abode.”


Among two of his prized possessions, besides the plethora of national and international honours he received for his contributions for the cause of farmers and co-operative movement, were two paintings — one, a large picture of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi addressing global milk delegates with a young Kurien beside her, which was autographed at his residence by the late Prime Minister. The second was another painting autographed on separate occasions by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, first conquerors of Mount Everest.






-The Hindu




Kurien, the doodhwalla visionary


Kurien made up his mind early and stuck to his position. He took on technocrats, businesses, bureaucrats and politicians


Verghese Kurien (90), who passed away yesterday at Nadiad near his beloved Anand, never tired of telling a story of a young man coerced into managing a near-defunct creamery at Anand in 1948 by his uncle, John Matthai, then the finance minister of India.

Kurien, a metallurgical engineer trained at Michigan State University in the US, was serving out his bond which Matthai refused to waive. Tribhuvandas Patel, a self-effacing Gandhian who led the dairy farmers of Kheda district to form a cooperative for getting remunerative prices for their milk, invited him to manage the fledgling organisation. Kurien agreed reluctantly for a period of six months in the then-godforsaken backwater. He never left, and died a proud Gujarati, the pioneer of a hugely successful enterprise that changed the face of dairying in India.

In those days, the Kheda milk went to Bombay. Traders paid unremunerative prices in the winter flush months. Under Patel’s leadership, farmers refused to sell milk to private dairies. The state government stepped in and bought milk for its Bombay milk scheme. That still did not solve the problem of seasonality of production causing gluts and shortages.

This problem is not unique to India. Dairies process surplus winter milk into milk powder and butter oil the world over, and recombine those into milk in the summer. Kurien decided this was the only way out. The problem was that the world used cow milk and Kheda had buffalo milk. No one had processed it until the 1950s. Kurien prevailed over stiff opposition from experts and scientists from leading dairying nations like New Zealand and persuaded Unicef to gift a plant to dry buffalo milk. Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated it in 1956. That was the beginning of the modern dairy business in India. Today, the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, which covers all the major milk-producing areas of the state, is a Rs 12,000-crore giant and its brand, Amul, has now achieved that iconic status of the brand name being synonymous with the generic product. It also connotes integrity and equitability, the values Kurien cherished throughout his long life.(MILESTONES)

That would be considered achievement enough for most people, but not Kurien. When he found the European Economic Community (EEC) was sitting atop a mountain of butter and milk powder in the 1960s that it intended to gift to India, he became worried that it would flood the market with cheap product and effectively kill the nascent dairy industry. He persuaded first the government and then EEC to gift the commodities to the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), which could then sell those at prevailing prices and use the funds generated for dairy development. Thus was born the felicitously named ‘Operation Flood’, which has made India the leading milk producer in the world today.

Kurien’s genius lay in combining the atomistic primary commodity production with large-scale modern processing, backed by nation-wide marketing. He created multi-tier organisations to implement this strategy, which have succeeded in most major states. He whole-heartedly espoused modern technology. When he found qualified managers hard to recruit, he decided to build his own Institute of Rural Management at Anand (Irma). It was my great good fortune to act as his man Friday (and the rest of the days of the week as well) at the start of this unique institution. The reputation Irma enjoys today and the experience of working with Kurien over the past three-and-a-half decades is among my most valued treasures.

Kurien made up his mind early and stuck to his position. He took on technocrats, businesses, bureaucrats and politicians. The phrase “I roundly abused him/them” used to embellish his numerous accounts. Yet, he managed to earn the respect of most people he worked with. He had equally amicable working relationships with Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi and Morarji Desai, a feat he shared with his fellow Gujarati,

I G Patel (and not getting the much-deserved Bharat Ratna). This fighting spirit and his small physical stature earned him the sobriquet rooster. It also led to avoidable controversies late in his life.

“There are many ways to skin a cat, but we know only one,” Kurien used to say when asked about his dogged approach. Unfortunately, that way did not include fading away gracefully, leaving only the charming grin behind.

-Business Standard






Amul's Verghese Kurien: Life & times of a white knight

 Verghese Kurien managed to cut through bureaucratic clutter because his projects had powerful endorsers in the prime ministers of the day. But his final years were marked by allegations of "dictatorship" and turf wars.



1946: THE BIRTH OF AMUL

Was founded to stop exploitation of farmers by middlemen. Better known as Amul Dairy, the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers Union began with just two village societies and 247 litres of milk. Tribhuvandas Patel was its founder chairman; Dr Verghese Kurien took over in 1950.



1965: NDDB

The then PM Lal Bahadur Shastri wanted to replicate the Amul model. At his instance, the National Dairy Development Board was set up and Dr Kurien was chosen to head the institution as its chairman. He was asked to replicate this model throughout the country.



1970: OPERATION FLOOD

NDDB launched 'Operation Flood', a programme that transformed India into the world's largest milk producer by establishing a countrywide milk grid. Dr Kurien is considered the father of Operation Flood, also referred to as the White Revolution. It was implemented in three phases: 1970-80, 1981-85 and 1985-96.



1998: QUITS NDDB

Kurien stepped down from the chairmanship of National Dairy Development Board. He never drew any salary from NDDB because he "always wanted to be an employee of the farmers, rather than the government."

Dr Kurien visits the ET newsroom in Ahmedabad in March 2008

His 90th birthday celebration in Nov, 2011

Dr Kurien with wife Molly and daughter Nirmala

Dr KR Narayanan confers Padma Vibhushan

When Rajiv Gandhi visited Anand

Adjusting mike for Dr Rajendra Prasad

With Indira Gandhi

Lal Bahadur Shastri took Kurien national

With President Dr S Radhakrishnan

Giving Jawaharlal Nehru the cooperative gift

-ET



Is Bharat Ratna for Verghese Kurien an honour or an insult?
 
It’s an art we specialize in. Forgetting our heroes while they are alive, and then clamouring for their Bharat Ratna, when they’ve departed. The case of V Kurien is no different.


Forgotten and bitter, there were hardly any takers for the nation’s Milk Man during his twilight years in Anand. Some say because he was pompous. Well, he wasn’t young at 90, but he was hardly senile! The truth is he wasn’t worth any TRP. That’s probably why he made it to the initial list of “Greatest Indians” on CNN-IBN, but never made it to the Top Ten. Sachin Tendulkar and Atal Bihari Vajpayee (both still to get the Bharat Ratna, by the way) did! There was also risk aversion. Advertising bucks from Kurien’s protégé-turned-enfant-terrible Amrita Patel were part of the blackout calculus.

But all of a sudden, among several others, Rajdeep Sardesai, the chief editor of CNN-INB, has sent out the regulation tweet that Kurien deserved the Bharat Ratna.

Is this anything but a crude attempt to ride on the nation’s nostalgia? We saw it when Field Marshal SHFJ Manekshaw passed away. In a more plebian sort of way, there was hysteria and a flood of crocodile tears when Rajesh Khanna, the forgotten superstar, died. For 48 hours, Khanna’s clips crowded out everything else. Even the funeral was live on the networks. A live-in partner’s claim to his property was P1 news!

My argument against Kurien’s Bharat Ratna is based on three points:

1. A posthumous Bharat Ratna is becoming a force of habit. Out of 41 awarded so far (42, if we include the “posthumous” one to Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose in 1992, which the award committee had to withdraw after failing to satisfy the supreme court), 13 were given during the prime ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Not one of them was posthumous: C Rajagopalachari (awardee: 1954, demise: 1972), CV Raman (awardee: 1954, demise: 1970), S Radhakrishnan (awardee: 1954, demise: 1975), Bhagwan Das (awardee: 1955, demise: 1958), Visvessaraya (awardee: 1955, demise: 1962), Nehru himself (1955), Govind Ballabh Pant (awardee: 1957, demise 1961), DK Karve (awardee: 1958, demise: 1962), BC Roy (awardee: 1961, demise: 1962), Purshottam Das Tandon (awardee: 1961, demise: 1962), Rajendra Prasad (awardee: 1962 demise: 1963), ZakirHussain (awardee: 1963, demise: 1969) and PV Kane (awardee: 1963, demise: 1972) got justice while they were alive.

Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad was offered the Bharat Ratna before he died in 1958, but he refused on moral grounds and the investiture was done in 1992: 34 years after his demise. Also, outside the scope of this essay, though not for any reasons of fairness, Nehru forgot at least three giants: Vallabhbhai Patel (recognized only in 1991: 40 years after his demise), Subhash Chandra Bose (detailed above) and BR Ambedkar (recognized in 1990, thirty four years after his demise in 1956).

Remember, Nehru’s was a time when the doyens of the freedom movement were alive. Many like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bhagat Singh hadn’t died a century ago. If he had rolled the clock back forty-fifty years, like his successors were to do, the list of Bharat Ratna would have had several hundred to today lie in oblivion. That was another time and the PM too much of a rationalist to be honouring the dead.

Politicization picked up soon after. Unwittingly, one might add. Lal Bahadur Shastri got the Bharat Ratna posthumously, in 1966, the amidst a wave of public grief over his unexpected demise during a trip to erstwhile U.S.S.R..

Then, Indira Gandhi helped herself to one in 1971, riding on the military victory in Bangladesh (Manekshaw, her chief of army staff, didn’t; he was, in fact, promoted to the five-star general position of Field Marshal for 14 days and then eased out, perhaps on account of trying to hog too much of the credit).

By then Bharat-Ratna politics had lost most of its post-Independence innocence. VV Giri got his five-minutes of fame in 1975, five years before his demise, surprising many on what he did to deserve the honour that Patel, Bose and Ambedkar hadn’t. In 1976 came the Bharat Ratna to K Kamraj, a sworn nemesis of the PM, but now safely in heaven! The one to Mother Teresa was non-controversial and happened 17 years before the angel’s demise in 1997.

The first Bharat Ratna in Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership was decided with impeccable criteria. Badshah Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan came down to New Delhi to receive it in 1987.

This set up what was to happen next year, a blot to a hoary tradition. The name of Tamil Nadu’s former chief minister MG Ramachandran was etched on the alumni list. The Tamil politics of the PM was MGR’s only qualification, MGR having died a year before. The gloves were off.

Posthumous tokenism engulfed Ambedkar (1990), Patel (1991), Azad (1992) and Netaji (1992), not to miss prime minister PV Narasimha Rao’s gambit to win support in the Congress with a posthumous Bharat Ratna to Rajiv Gandhi himself, and one to Nelson Mandela, the first to someone outside the Indian subcontinent. That year was something. JRD Tata and Satyajit Ray got one too.

In the interim, as if to balance the score card from the tag of Nehru-Gandhi domination, Morarji Desai got his Bharat Ratna in 1991 (demise: 1995), GulzariLal Nanda in 1997, at a fantastic age of 99, and ArunaAsaf Ali one year after she died. Importantly, Jai Prakash Narain did only in 1999, twenty years after he had died.

In recent decades, with consensus getting rarer, the politicos have lost a little bit of their brazenness. So, we’ve had singers M S Subbulakshmi (1998), LataMangeshkar (2001) and Bhimsen Joshi (2008), musicians Ravi Shankar (1999) and Bismillah Khan (2001), scientists C Chandrasekhar (1998) and APJ Abdul Kalam (1997), and economist Amartya Sen in 1999, but after the world had recognized him with the Nobel Prize.

The only politico who got Bharat Ratna recently is a chief minister from Assam, Gopinath Bordoloi, in 1999, but 49 years after he had died! If this wasn’t tokenism, what is?

Honouring Kurien thus, if he’s deserving of being in this club, should have been done when he was alive. Today, it’s a plain afterthought, hardly of inspirational value to a life of serving `Bharat,’ that mass of India that remains submerged in marginal farming, survival still hinging on vagaries of the monsoon, and poor quality of livestock.

2. Kurien has already received a Padma Vibhushan in 1999, preceded by a Padma Shri and a Padma Bhushan. A sudden Bharat Ratna doesn’t have compelling evidence of sterling work post the PadmaVibhushan. Thanks to internal politics with the men and women he created, the fact is that the last 13 years don’t have all that much to show.

An emotional “upgrade” to the Bharat Ratna would also mean a question mark to the claims of other builders of modern India. I merely mention E Sreedharan in mass-urban transportation, Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan in space, and M S Swaminathan in ushering the green revolution (see complete list).

It may interest that Homi Bhabha, the father of our nuclear programme, and a favourite of Nehru, didn’t go beyond a Padma Bhushan, the thrid-highest honour, what to speak of the Padma Vibhushan or Bharat Ratna.

3. A man like Kurien needn’t be remembered via tokenism. His passion and ability was to set up a template for a milk cooperative in a land that depended on the rains, whose cattle was barely average in yields, and whose farmers hardly in the reckoning for their literacy and progressive approach.

Can we, instead of meaningless debates on a Bharat Ratna, do something about bringing his ideas into states that have far better resources than Gujarat, Kurien’s original catchment?

Can the cooperatives rise above being sinecures for the IAS and attract pass outs from the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IIRMA), an institution Kurien could build with his bare hands, when his nephew Ravi John Mathai, another builder of modern India, couldn’t give him pass outs from the neighbouring Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A)? As Vivek Bhandari, a recent director at IRMA puts it, the man’s genetic imprint straddles across an array of institutions in the development sector, as does his heroic effort to have kept the babus at bay.

Unfortunately, as NDDB struggles for an over-arching role and impact, no state truly benefitted from the cooperative movement that Kurien fathered. The loss wasn’t his alone. Can, say, Pradeshik Cooperative Development Federation of U.P. even invite school children to its collection floors without putting them off milk forever?

So, the true Bharat Ratna for this great son of India isn’t about a bureaucratic body chaired by cabinet secretary Ajit Seth moving a file. In my book, Kurien already has one.

Bharat Ratna for Kurien is, as I paraphrase the glimpse shared by IIRMA alum and my old colleague Andy Mukherjee, lies in the hut of the farmer in Gujarat who keeps a black and white picture of this Syrian Christian, in between idols of Lakshmi and Ganesh. It’s conch is the hooter at 3.30 am, where the entire village, totally dependent on dairying, wakes up with a smile and gets down to milking!

Bharat Ratna for Kurien lies in the impact his convocation speech at IIM-A had in shaping the life of a child of reform like Sanjeev Bikhchandani. Then in his first year of the PGDBM course, Bikchandani recounts: “First he (Kurien) narrated to us some glimpses of his life and the choices he had made. Then, he congratulated the graduating batch on a long career ahead as shampoo salesmen. He suggested that the name of IIM-A be changed to ‘The Indian Institute of Management for Shampoo Salesmen.’ He then exhorted us to do something different with our lives and not just seek personal comfort and careers as employee managers in an MNC. He gave us a glimpse of a higher order goal. I must confess that I still remember his speech and what he said was one more nail in the coffin of my future career as an employee manager in a large company. I quit my corporate job within two years of graduating from IIM-A.”

Bharat Ratna for Kurien lies within each of the hundreds and thousands of “shares” on the social media of the tear in the eye of the Amul Girl, the character he co-created with Sylvestor daCunha.

Kurien needn’t be picked up by a committee that works on lobbying and trade-offs and testimonial letters from ministers [should we be surprised if AK Antony or Narendra Modi join Sardesai’s demand for Kurien now?]. From his heavenly abode, he’d rather see Robin Bahadur, the 9-year-old in our household, drink Mother Dairy milk every day, only because his parents Chandra Bahadur and GangaMaiya, can afford it.

RIP, V Kurien. You are a true Bharat Ratna. Who knows he’ll now be out there building cooperative dairies in the skies. 

 -Governance Now