In 1949, a young engineer named Verghese Kurien was posted, somewhat against his own wishes, to a government dairy research creamery in the small town of Anand, Gujarat. He had trained in metallurgy and nuclear engineering abroad and had little interest in milk — he initially planned to serve out his mandatory government bond and leave as soon as possible.
Instead, he met local farmers who were being exploited by a private dairy that paid them next to nothing for milk it then sold at a large profit. Kurien decided to stay and help them build their own cooperative instead, giving farmers direct ownership over the processing and sale of their milk rather than leaving them dependent on middlemen.
The cooperative he helped build, Amul, grew from a handful of village dairy societies into a nationwide movement called Operation Flood, which Kurien led starting in 1970. It organized millions of small dairy farmers, many of them women, into a cooperative network that transformed India from a milk-deficient country into the largest milk producer in the world.
Kurien insisted throughout his career that the profits stay with the farmers who produced the milk, not with a corporation or the government, turning what could have been just another large dairy business into one of the most successful cooperative movements in the world.