There is nothing special about Anand!
The year was 1964 and the then Prime Minister of India, Lal Bahadur Sashtri was scheduled to visit Gujarat to open a cattle feed factory located around 8 kilometers from the town of Anand where the success of a dairy cooperative called Amul was transforming lives and creating significant economic impact.
The PM made an unusual request to modify his programme to fit in an additional day and he wished to spend it in a local village as a guest of a small-scale farmer. His request was duly acknowledged and the one night that he spent at the village of Ajarpura as a guest of Ramanbhai resulted in an idea that transformed into a revolution.
After spending the night exploring the village and talking to the locals, he remarked
- I looked at the soil, good soil but not as good as the Indo-Gangetic plains
- I asked about the weather, cold in winter and very hot in summer. Nothing special
- I enquired about the rainfall, thirty inches of rain over three months of monsoon. Just like the rest of India
- I had expected the landscape to be green but the whole place is brown
- I looked at the buffaloes but they were not as good as the ones I have seen back home in Uttar Pradesh
- I looked at the Farmers. Farmers are always good people but the ones here are not as hardworking as the farmers of Punjab
and when he was told about the way the Amul co-operative functioned by its chief, Dr.Kurien, the Prime Minister’s face lit up and with a dose of excitement he said,
‘Kurien, this means that we can have many Anands. There are no special reasons to have an Anand only in Gujarat. So then from tomorrow, you shall make it your business to work not just for Anand, not just for Gujarat, but for the whole of India’
The Father of India’s ‘Operation Flood’ nodded his head in agreement and India’s dairy ecosystem went on to become the Country’s pride while transforming millions of lives. The one night that PM Sashtri spent in a remote village at the house of a small-scale farmer unlocked a billion liters and counting.
The above story is from the book ‘I too had a dream’ by Dr. Verghese Kurien.
