India Made About 21 Million Tonnes of Milk a Year When Verghese Kurien's Operation Flood Began in 1970, and 247.87 Million Tonnes in 2024-25

India produced about 17 million tonnes of milk in 1950-51 and 247.87 million tonnes in 2024-25, according to the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s press office, and it has been the world’s largest producer since 1998. The route between those two numbers runs through a farmers’ strike in Kaira district of Gujarat in 1946, an engineer who did not want to be posted there, and a programme called Operation Flood, launched in 1970. How much of the rise belongs to that programme is still argued by economists, and this piece sets out both sides by name.

A country short of milk

In its 2022 feature on the dairy sector, the PIB describes India in the 1950s and 1960s as a milk-deficit nation that depended on imports. Annual production growth was negative in several years. The compound growth rate was 1.64 per cent a year in the first decade after independence and 1.15 per cent in the 1960s.

The PIB puts milk availability at 124 grams a day in 1950-51 and 107 grams in 1970, and says the country made less than 21 million tonnes a year around 1970. Output in 1968-69 was 21.2 million tonnes.

Kaira in 1946, and the engineer who arrived in 1949

Kaira district (now usually called Kheda) sent milk to Bombay through the Bombay Milk Scheme, and the main supplier was Polson, a private dairy at Anand. Kurien’s account says that in the mid-1940s the farmers asked Polson for a share of the profit and were refused even a modest rise. ThePrint’s account, written by TR Vivek, adds that the farmers saw only a fraction of the city price.

According to Kurien, a farmers’ meeting at Samarkha village on 4 January 1946, called by Morarji Desai on the advice of Vallabhbhai Patel, began the first dairy cooperative in Gujarat. Vallabhbhai Patel gave Tribhuvandas Patel the job of organising the farmers. ThePrint reports a strike of 15 days and a union registered by December 1946 as the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union.

The dates do not line up everywhere. The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s 1963 citation says the union was organised in 1948 by combining two village societies, and that by 1962 it had 219 farmer societies and 46,400 members. The PIB calls the Kaira union the precursor of Amul, a brand name the union registered in 1957, according to ThePrint and an Amul tribute site.

Verghese Kurien was born in Kozhikode, Kerala, on 26 November 1921, the PIB says. After a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Michigan State University, he was posted in May 1949 as a dairy engineer at the government creamery in Anand. His own account says the job held no challenge, and that he volunteered to help Tribhuvandas Patel set up a processing plant for the union. ThePrint says Patel offered him the post of general manager in 1950.

The Magsaysay citation named Kurien, Patel and D. N. Khurody, who had been Bombay’s milk commissioner, as its 1963 laureates for community leadership. It calls Patel the “organizing genius” of the cooperative and says Kurien supplied administrative and scientific direction.

The buffalo-milk powder plant of 1955

Buffaloes in Kaira gave about twice as much milk in winter as in summer, ThePrint reports, and the winter surplus had nowhere to go. Amul Dairy’s own account says limited demand led to “milk holidays”, when farmers’ deliveries were halted, and that buffalo milk was widely thought unsuitable for spray-drying, a method that sprays milk into hot air to leave dry powder, because of its high fat content.

Harichand Megha Dalaya, a dairy technologist born in Karachi in 1921 who had studied at Michigan State, is credited by Amul Dairy with the world’s first buffalo-milk spray-dryer, installed in 1955 with support from Kurien and Patel. The Amul tribute site to Kurien tells it differently, crediting Kurien with the successful experiments under Dalaya’s guidance. Both pages come from Amul-linked sites, so the split of credit between the two men rests on interested accounts.

A contemporary outside record exists for the plant itself. The Magsaysay citation of 1963 says it was the first in India to make milk powder, condensed milk and baby milk powder, and the first in the world to turn buffalo milk into powder. The tribute site says Rajendra Prasad laid its foundation stone on 15 November 1954 and Jawaharlal Nehru opened it on 31 October 1955.

From one district to a national programme

In October 1964 Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri visited Anand and spent a night as the guest of a village milk cooperative. Kurien writes that Shastri wanted a national body to repeat the Anand pattern, in which village societies own a district union and the unions of a state form a marketing federation. The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) was registered in 1965 at Anand, with Kurien as its first chairman, the PIB says.

Operation Flood followed in 1970. Europe held surplus skim milk powder (milk with the fat removed and the water dried off) and butter oil (milk fat). The European Economic Community gave these through the World Food Programme, and India sold them at home and used the money to build the cooperative network. A government company, the Indian Dairy Corporation, was set up in 1970 to handle the donated goods, because NDDB’s founding statutes did not allow it to hold government funds. Parliament merged the two bodies in 1987 and declared NDDB an institution of national importance.

The NDDB’s own account of the three phases gives these figures:

• Phase I, 1970 to 1980: 18 of the country’s main milksheds (the areas that supply a city) were linked to Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai.
• Phase II, 1981 to 1985: milksheds rose from 18 to 136 and 290 urban markets were added. By the end of 1985 there were 43,000 village cooperatives with 4.25 million milk producers. Domestic milk powder output rose from 22,000 tonnes in the year before the project to 140,000 tonnes by 1989.
• Phase III, 1985 to 1996: 30,000 new cooperatives were added to the 42,000 formed earlier, and milksheds peaked at 173 in 1988-89. A National Milk Grid now links producers with consumers in more than 700 towns and cities.

Kurien’s 2004 case study dates the first two phases as 1970 to 1979 and 1979 to 1985. It also reports US$360 million from the World Bank in Phase III and total investment of Rs 15.87 billion (Rs 1,587 crore) by the end of that phase.

The production figures, and who gets the credit

The PIB’s figures are 17 million tonnes in 1950-51, 21.2 million in 1968-69, 30.4 million in 1979-80 and 51.4 million in 1989-90. The NDDB’s table, compiled from the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, gives 69.1 million tonnes in 1996-97, as Phase III ended, and 239.3 million in 2023-24. The department’s 2025 statistics put 2024-25 at 247.87 million tonnes, up 3.58 per cent, with 485 grams of milk available per person per day.

The share of world output depends on the source. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says India produces 22 per cent of the global total, ahead of the United States, Pakistan, China and Brazil. The PIB says “nearly one-fourth” in 2025 and 25 per cent in 2024. The cooperative network the PIB counts today has 22 state federations, 241 district unions and 1.72 crore (17.2 million) dairy farmers in 2.35 lakh villages. A separate PIB release says the dairy sector as a whole supports 8.5 crore rural households, so cooperative members are one part of a much larger sector.

Kurien’s 2004 account says “the credit for this should mainly go to OF”, meaning Operation Flood. Other researchers disagree. Nalini Kumar’s 1997 review for the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA, the institute Kurien founded) summarises the argument. Its starting point is that no long-term study has measured the programme’s effect on output, and that the studies that exist compare villages with and without cooperatives.

Those comparisons favour the cooperatives. Mergos and Slade found milk output about 17.5 per cent higher over five years in project households than in others in Madhya Pradesh. Kumar and Singh found 6.92 litres per household a day in cooperative villages in Rajasthan against 4.93 in control villages, and credited better marketing links.

Indian and Dutch researchers including Doornbos wrote in 1987 that their field work did not confirm “the grand claims” made for the programme, and argued that outside some advanced regions the rise in milk bought by cooperatives came mainly from farmers switching from ghee traders, not from more milk. G. Parthasarathy showed in 1991 that most fast-growing states had no dairy cooperatives at the end of Phase I, and argued that the jump in the 1970s came mainly from a shift to high-yielding buffaloes, whose numbers in milk rose nearly 40 per cent between 1961 and 1982 against about 11 per cent for cows. Others credit assured prices, new technology and fodder from the Green Revolution, the push for higher grain yields told in our piece on India’s move from grain imports to exports.

Kumar’s own conclusion is that the evidence shows “substantial growth” and that Operation Flood played a major role in it, directly or indirectly. She also notes that much of the evidence is anecdotal.

Whether the small producer gained

Operation Flood was promoted as a way to help the landless and the poorest. The studies split on whether it did.

Baviskar, writing in 1988 on Gujarat, found that dairy cooperatives brought benefits but widened the income gap between large and small farmers. Franco and Chand, studying tribal South Gujarat in 1991, wrote that landless labourers and marginal farmers were “relatively outside the cooperatives.” Parthasarathy found that 17 of every 100 landless households took part in dairying in Gujarat and 9 in Punjab. Mergos and Slade concluded the project could not reach “the poorest of the poor.”

Other studies found the opposite. Singh and Acharya’s Madhya Pradesh study found landless and poorer households produced markedly more milk in cooperative villages than in control villages. Fulton and Bhargava, using NDDB data, reported that 35 per cent of producers were landless and 28 per cent marginal landholders, with an average of 1.4 litres delivered a day.

Fodder was the barrier critics named most often. A family needs money to buy an animal and land or access to feed to keep it, and Baviskar called fodder the most serious constraint. Kurien said in 1987, as the review quotes him, that Operation Flood is “not an all purpose poverty removal program.” On women, the review records one side saying dairying raised women’s workload and another saying it gave them a way to improve their standing, and concludes that more research is needed.

The European surplus and the dependency charge

The funding model drew the sharpest objections. Doornbos and Gertsch wrote in 1994 that the European Community first saw the programme as a way to dispose of its surplus and only in the 1980s as a development tool. Shanti George argued in 1987 that financing the programme by selling imported dairy goods created a “dangerous substratum of subsidies.” Gertsch added that the donated powder was sold below the cost of Indian production, which hid the real cost of milk.

Defenders cited figures. Chatterjee and Acharya showed imported powder and butter oil falling from 54 per cent of organised-sector milk in 1961 to 17 per cent in 1971 and 2 per cent in 1989. Kurien called the aid an investment whose goal was to end the need for aid. Kumar’s review concludes that the claim that Operation Flood left the dairy sector open to outside pressure “does not seem to have an empirical basis.”

A shorter account of the programme is in our earlier article on Kurien and Anand.

The board fight of 2006

The complaint that NDDB was too autonomous and too top-down is in the IRMA review, with advocates replying that the government backed its methods. It became personal in Kurien’s last decade. By 2005 he was fighting efforts to remove him from the chair of IRMA, Gulf News reported on 19 April 2005, against a camp backed by Amrita Patel, the NDDB chairman, who had once been his protégé.

On 20 March 2006 Kurien resigned as chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), which owns Amul, after its board moved to oust him. He cited a Gujarat High Court order on co-opting members to cooperative committees. “I did my best, in my small way, to fulfill the dreams of Indian farmers,” he told a news conference, according to Business Standard. exchange4media, which described him as in conflict with Patel over her idea of corporatising cooperatives, quoted him as saying “The NDDB is building its own empire.” Patel replied that NDDB was “turning co-operative bodies into professional entities.”

DNA reported that the remaining eight board members elected Parthi Bhatol of the Banaskantha union as his successor, while four members walked out complaining of government interference. Kurien told DNA that a cooperative cannot have a lifetime chairman. He died on 9 September 2012. The PIB’s 2025 backgrounder puts Amul’s turnover at more than Rs 90,000 crore in 2024-25, with 3.6 million farmer members.