IF THE unceremonious exit of Dr Verghese Kurien, the architect of India’s White Revolution, ‘Operation Flood’, winner of Ramon Magsaysay Prize for Community Leadership, the Carnegie-Wateler World Peace Prize and the World Food Prize in 2006, from Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation had not numbed your senses at that time, here comes the shocker: They are now planning to withdraw facilities of a car and a driver for his personal use and a cook at his Anand residence. All this, because something written in ’fine print’ of the Cooperative Act will be violated according to a well cushioned pen-pusher who has the blessings of a political authority.
This is the honour given to the man whose untiring efforts of five decades created an empire of milk, which provides job to 9 million poor farmers and milkmen belonging to more than 10,000 cooperatives across India. This is the homage paid by the current management of the very cooperative he had created and nurtured for half a century.
The great Indian ’System of Politicisation’ has succeeded in driving one more nail into the coffin of one more legend. You can’t forget Dr Verghese Kurien. In case you do not recall, rewind your memory a bit and you will find a certain Bill Clinton of United States dancing with milkmaids of Rajasthan in 2001 and expressing amazement at the milk-cooperative system that had empowered those poor women. One of the pictures on page 1 of The New York Times that day showed a garlanded Clinton pensively listening to a group of women in the Rajasthani village in Nayala explaining to him their efforts to be self-sufficient. Well the dance steps of those ’empowerd milkmaids’ had been choreographed way back in 1949, in a remote village called Anand in Gujarat by an unassuming US returned mechanical engineer named Veghese Kurien who set up AMUL and kickstarted the milk cooperative revolution in India. Not only did his brainchild make India self-sufficient in milk, it made India the largest producer of milk beating US in 2003.
Today when a green card or temporary US citizenship is viewed as the gateway to heaven by our starry-eyed NRIs, Verghese returned to India after getting his engineering degree from Michigan University to pursue a dream. He sacrificed his well settled job as a dairy engineer at a government creamery in Anand, in May 1949 and joined a start-up cooperative dairy, Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union (KDCMPUL), to help its chairman, Sri Tribhubandas Patel and set-up a processing plant. This marked the birth of Amul. The rest, as they say, was milk and honey!
Is providing a driver and a cook to such a visionary at his old age not our national duty? Is it really too costly? Kurien does not have a personal car! When he was forced to resign in 2006, the driver and cook was provided by GCMMF as a mark of respect for his lifetime contribution to the cooperative movement in India. Now, after 30 months, someone has discovered that these perks to a retired chairman infringe on the divine rules of the cooperative concern! For the records, the driver and the cook working for Dr Kurien, together command a princely salary of Rs 20,000. Because of failing health and old age, Dr Kurien rarely ventures out and his petrol bills rarely exceed Rs 2,000 a month. Dr Kurien had stopped accepting any salary ever since he attained the age of 58 years and gave honorary services to the NDDB for the next 24 years and the GCMMF for the next 28 years till he quit both the offices.
If you think that it is too much of a drain on the national exchequer consider this: A World Bank audit in 1998, revealed that of the Rs 200 crore the World Bank invested in Operation Flood, the net return into India’s rural economy was a massive Rs 24,000 crore each year over a period of 10 years. Which bureaucrat or politician can claim to have contributed that much too Indian economy? And how much perks and privileges do our politicians and bureaucrats enjoy when they retire? Many of them, on retirement, make their way to the management board of some government/semi-government body/PSU/co-operative society/sports association for a lifetime of freeloading!
Wouldn’t Kurien be better placed in his old age had he got into some bureaucratic post earlier in his career or volunteered to contest an election for a convenient political party well before his retirement?
Think of another distinguished person, E Sridhran. Dubbed as ‘Metro Man’ for completing the Delhi Metro Rail Project in record time, he was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) by the government of France and Padma Vibhusana by Indian Government. But when, in his capacity as the consultant to Hyderabad Metro Project, he warned that ’making available 296 acres of prime land to the BOT (Build, Operate and Transfer) developer for commercial exploitation was like selling the family silver which smacked of a big political scandal’, he was immediately pilloried. In November, 2008, Finance Minister K Rosaiah, Municipal Administration Minister Koneru Ranga Rao and the managing director of Hyderabad Metro Rail Limited, NVS Reddy, stated at a Press conference that they would sue E Sreedharan unless he took back his comments without reservation and tendered an unconditional apology. Two months down the line when Satyam collapsed, it was found that this conscientious BOT operator was none other than Maytas Infra, run by Ramalinga Raju’s son, Teja and the bureaucratic establishment had to eat their words! Remember, when Kurien had resigned in 2006, he had protested about the creeping corruption and attempt to corporatise the co-operatives, which had served the poor over half a century. Whether his words will prove as prophetic as Sreedharan’s remains to be seen!
Kurien is not an isolated case of the widely prevalent systemic disdain in India towards nurturing or honouring talent. This is not just the case with India but with many Asian countries. But the best example of this genre is in our neighbouring country, Pakistan. When Abdus Salaam became the first Pakistani to get a Nobel in Physics, he became an embarrassment for General Zia and his establishment since the Ahamediya Community to which Dr Salaam belonged, had been declared an un-Islamic sect through a constitutional amendment. In his speeches delivered in various universities of Pakistan immediately after receiving Nobel prize, references to Islam or any Islamic scripture were deliberately omitted by the official press. When he died, the Pakistani state was scared to touch his body since Ahmedis are non-Muslims and no ‘kaalima’ could be read at his funeral. So much so that the epitaph on his grave at his village now terms him as the ’First Nobel Prize Winner’ instead of ’First Muslim Nobel Prize Winner’, the middle word ’Muslim’ having been erased by a zealous district administration in accordance with the prevailing religious dictates.
Kurien, who has been treated shabbily is popularly known as the real ’milkman of India’. Paradoxically, the other ’milkman’, Lord Krishna, is revered and worshipped by millions of our countrymen.
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