Verghese Kurien and the power of social entrepreneurship

Instead, he went one better, triggering a movement that saw a country once deficient in milk turn into the world’s biggest producer of this most essential food product.

Born in 1921 into an affluent Syrian Christian family in Kerala, Kurien did not aim to transform Indian agriculture. He trained as a physicist and mechanical engineer, and only entered dairy engineering after a government scholarship sent him to Michigan State University.

On his return to India in 1949, he was posted to Anand, in Gujarat, a hub for dairy cooperatives, as part of the bond he had signed for his scholarship. Kurien had no intention of staying and looked forward to moving on to a more promising career.

Starting up, he confronted a seemingly wicked problem. Experts insisted that producing skimmed milk powder from buffalo milk on a commercial scale was impractical. Buffalo milk behaves very differently from cow’s milk during processing, making large-scale drying difficult. This thinking had condemned India to heavy dependence on imported milk powder.

Kurien roped in Harichand Megha Dalaya, a fellow dairy engineer trained in India and the US. Dalaya arrived in Anand for a brief visit but, like Kurien, stayed for decades. Through sustained experimentation and indigenous engineering, the team developed a viable process for spray-drying buffalo milk. By the mid-1950s, this breakthrough had laid the technological foundation for Amul and for India’s self-reliance in dairy.

The impact was transformative. Buffalo milk was abundant in India, and millions of small farmers depended on it for income. By giving producers direct access to markets through cooperatives, the Amul model ensured fair prices and regular payments. Milk, already a crucial source of nutrition, became the backbone of a self-sustaining rural industry.

Of the institutions Kurien built, the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), founded in 1979, was especially close to his heart. When some people suggested a rustic campus designed to resemble a village, Kurien famously dismissed the idea. Rural India, he believed, needed professionals trained to think big and act at scale.

Kurien also understood the power of narrative. When filmmaker Shyam Benegal proposed a film on the cooperative movement, the Milkman helped organize India’s first large-scale experiment in crowdfunding. Farmers were asked if they would accept a small, one-time reduction in the price paid for their milk so they could fund a film about their own lives. Thousands of them agreed. The resulting film, Manthan, won the National Film Award, became India’s official Oscar entry, and was screened at the UN.

Despite his influence, Kurien lived simply for much of his life in Anand. An avowed atheist, he remained sceptical of personal glorification. When he died on 9 September 2012, dairy farming had become the country’s largest self-sustaining rural industry. Yet the final chapter of his glorious career was a painful one as he was eased out of both the IRMA and the institutions at Anand that had defined his life’s work. The separation was deeply wounding, but he refused to speak about it in public.

Perhaps that, too, is part of his story. Kurien was never comfortable with sentimentality, nor with being turned into a monument. What mattered to him were systems that functioned without their creator.

Amul endured and flourished, as did the IRMA. The cooperatives carried on, imperfect but alive. Long after Kurien left Anand, the churn he set in motion continued across the country.