Verghese Kurien

Verghese Kurien (26 November 1921 – 9 September 2012) was an Indian engineer and renowned social entrepreneur, best known as the "Father of the White Revolution", for his 'billion-litre idea' or Operation Flood — the world's biggest agricultural development programme. The operation took India from being a milk-deficient nation, to the largest milk producer in the world, surpassing the USA in 1998, with about 17 percent of global output in 2010–11, which in 30 years doubled the milk available to every person,. Dairy farming became India’s largest self-sustaining industry. He made the country self-sufficient in edible oils too later on, taking head-on the powerful and entrenched oil supplying lobby.

He would brook no meddling from the political class or bureaucrats sitting in the capital cities, letting it be known upfront, though he, and his mentor and colleague, Tribhuvandas Patel were backed by the few enlightened political leaders and bureaucrats of the early Independence days who saw merit in their pioneering cooperative model. He founded around 30 institutions of excellence (like AMUL, GCMMF, IRMA, NDDB) which are owned, managed by farmers and run by professionals. As the founding chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), Kurien was responsible for the creation and success of the Amul brand of dairy products. A key achievement at Amul was the invention of milk powder processed from buffalo milk (abundant in India), as opposed to that made from cow-milk, in the then major milk producing nations. His achievements with the Amul dairy led Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to appoint him founder-chairman of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in 1965, to replicate Amul's "Anand model" nationwide.

One of the greatest proponents of the cooperative movement in the world, his work has alleviated millions out of poverty not only in India but also outside. Hailed as the "Milkman of India", Kurien won several awards including the Padma Vibhushan (India's second-highest civilian honour), the World Food Prize and the Magsaysay Award for community leadership.