Verghese Kurien

Founder

Founder of National Foundation for India (NFI)

Photo: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA)

Verghese Kurien is the founding trustee of National Foundation for India (NFI) (1990)[1], an Indian non-profit working on human rights and livelihood from New Delhi.

Verghese Kurien (26 November 1921 – 9 September 2012) was an Indian dairy engineer and cooperative organiser who led the transformation of India's milk economy. He built the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union at Anand in Gujarat, whose products are sold under the Amul brand, and headed the National Dairy Development Board from 1965, directing the programme known as Operation Flood.

Alongside his dairy work he was involved in the founding of several national institutions. He was one of the founding trustees of the National Foundation for India, a grant-making foundation for civil society seeded in 1990 by C. Subramaniam, Kamla Chowdhry and M. S. Swaminathan together with other public figures; the foundation records that Kurien and his fellow founding trustees helped shape its management structures and programme strategy in its early years.

Early life and education

Kurien was born on 26 November 1921 in Calicut, now Kozhikode, in present-day Kerala. He took a degree in physics from Loyola College in 1940 and then studied mechanical engineering at the College of Engineering, Guindy, University of Madras, graduating in 1943. He was sent by the Government of India to the United States, where he took a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Michigan State University in 1948, and he also trained at the Imperial Institute of Animal Husbandry in Bangalore.

Career

On returning to India in 1949 Kurien was posted to a government experimental creamery at Anand in Gujarat. He stayed on to assist the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union, which he helped establish as a farmer-owned dairy in 1950; its brand, Amul, became one of the best known in India.

In 1965 the Government of India created the National Dairy Development Board and appointed Kurien its head. Through the board he directed Operation Flood, a programme that organised milk producers into village cooperatives linked to urban markets. The first phase ran from 1970 to 1979 across eighteen milk sheds, the second from 1979 to 1985 extended the network to more than 290 towns, and the third ran to the mid-1990s with an emphasis on self-sufficiency. By 1998 India had become the world's largest producer of milk.

Kurien founded the Institute of Rural Management Anand in 1979 and in the same year began an oilseeds growers' cooperative project on similar lines. He was chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation until he resigned in 2006. He was also among the founding trustees of the National Foundation for India.

Kurien died at Nadiad in Gujarat on 9 September 2012, aged 90.

Recognition

Kurien received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1963. He was appointed Padma Shri in 1965, Padma Bhushan in 1966 and Padma Vibhushan in 1999. He received the Wateler Peace Prize of the Carnegie Foundation in 1986 and the World Food Prize in 1989, and was named International Person of the Year at the World Dairy Expo in 1993. France conferred its Order of Agricultural Merit on him in 1997. Michigan State University awarded him an honorary degree in 1965.[2][3][4]

National Foundation for India (NFI)

National Foundation for India is a New Delhi-based grantmaking foundation established in 1990 that strengthens civil society organisations and promotes leadership among marginalised communities. It works across climate action, women's empowerment, constitutional values, gender rights and health & nutrition, partnering with roughly 300 civil society organisations across 24 states.

National Foundation for India (NFI) reports the following, on its own site: