Cooperative Movement (Amul)

The Anand Pattern is a three-storey building, and every question about Amul is a question about which storey. Ground floor: the village milk cooperative society, where the farmer pours milk and is paid on fat content. First floor: the district cooperative milk producers' union, which owns the chilling plant and dairy and processes the milk. Top floor: the state federation, which owns the brand and does the marketing. The revolutionary part is that the farmers own all three storeys upward, so the processing and marketing margin — the part a middleman normally keeps — comes back down to the producer. Once you can climb the three storeys, Operation Flood, the National Dairy Development Board and the Amul brand all slot into place as extensions of the same structure.

• The Anand pattern: village society, district union, state federation.

  Milk producers form a village cooperative society; village societies own the district union that processes the milk; district unions own the state federation that markets it under one brand. Ownership runs upward from the farmer, which is the whole point of the model.

• Kaira union makes it, GCMMF sells it, NDDB scales it.

  Three organisations, three jobs. The Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union at Anand is where it began. The Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation markets the Amul brand. The National Dairy Development Board, also at Anand, took the model national through Operation Flood.

• 1The Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union was formed in 1946 at Anand, with Tribhuvandas Patel as its founding chairman.
• 2Verghese Kurien, often called the father of the White Revolution, built the technical and institutional side of the model.
• 3The National Dairy Development Board was set up at Anand in 1965 and launched Operation Flood in 1970.
• 4Operation Flood, the White Revolution programme, made India the world's largest milk producer.
• 5The Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, formed in the 1970s, markets the Amul brand on behalf of the district unions.
• 6Amul is the brand; the cooperative structure behind it is separate from the brand and is what makes the model distinctive.

• The Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union was founded at Anand in 1946 under the inspiration of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and the organising work of Tribhuvandas Patel, as a response to farmers' exploitation by a private milk contractor.
• Verghese Kurien, called the father of the White Revolution in India, led Amul and later headed the National Dairy Development Board, which was set up at Anand in 1965 to replicate the Anand Pattern across the country.
• Operation Flood, launched in 1970 by the National Dairy Development Board, was the world's largest dairy development programme; it built a national milk grid linking rural producers to urban consumers and made India the world's largest milk producer.
• The Amul brand is owned and marketed by the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, the state-level apex federation of the district milk unions, with its headquarters at Anand.
• Cooperation is a state subject and cooperative societies are registered by the state Registrar of Cooperative Societies; the 97th Constitutional Amendment of 2011 made forming cooperative societies a fundamental right under Article 19 and inserted Part IXB on cooperatives.
• Gujarat's cooperative sector extends well beyond dairy — into credit through district cooperative banks, cotton ginning, sugar, fisheries and consumer stores — which is why the state is usually described as having one of India's strongest cooperative traditions.

• Kurien did not found the union — Tribhuvandas Patel did, and Kurien joined and built it up. Questions exploit the confusion between founder and architect.
• The White Revolution is milk; the Green Revolution is foodgrain and the Blue Revolution is fisheries.

• I Too Had a Dream by Verghese Kurien
• NCERT Class XI — Indian Economic Development
• Gujarat Socio-Economic Review, published annually by the state government

• NCERT textbooks (free PDFs)
• Union Budget
• Reserve Bank of India
• NITI Aayog