Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel

Patel was born on 22 October 1903 at Anand in Gujarat. A follower of Mahatma Gandhi, he took part in the civil disobedience movement and was imprisoned in 1930, 1935 and 1942.

In 1946 Patel organised the milk producers of Kaira district into the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union, formally registered in 1948, as a response to the terms imposed on farmers by private dairy contractors. As its president he was described by the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation as the organising genius behind the cooperative. By 1962 the union covered 219 village societies with 46,400 members and had established the Amul brand. In 1950 he recruited Verghese Kurien, who went on to manage the organisation for decades.

Patel was also involved in the creation of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, the National Dairy Development Board and the Institute of Rural Management Anand. In politics he served as secretary and later president of the Pradesh Congress Committee and was a member of the Rajya Sabha from 1967 to 1968 and from 1968 to 1974.

The Tribhuvandas Foundation was registered as a public charitable trust in 1975 under the Bombay Public Trusts Act, 1950, and began operations in 1980. It works chiefly on maternal and child health, delivering services through village health volunteers — local women trained by the foundation and paid by the village dairy cooperative societies — alongside clinical centres at Anand, Kapadvanj, Kheda, Tarapur and Balasinor. From roughly 400 villages at the outset it grew to serve more than a thousand villages across Anand, Kheda and Mahisagar districts.

He died on 3 June 1994, aged 90.

Patel received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1963, jointly with Dara Nusserwanji Khurody and Verghese Kurien, and the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 1964.[2][3][4][5]