I too had a Dream by Verghese Kurien & Gouri Salvi

Author:Verghese Kurien & Gouri Salvi [Kurien, Verghese]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788174364074
Publisher: Roli Books Pvt Ltd
Published: 2012-12-26T18:30:00+00:00

TOUGH TIMES

WE HAD ANTICIPATED THAT PHASE-I OF OPERATION FLOOD WOULD BE completed in five years. However, it took ten. Therefore, the cost, which was originally budgeted at Rs 96 crore, escalated to Rs 116 crore. We generated the additional funds required by increasing the selling price of the milk powder.

Most of the delay in implementing this phase of the project was caused in creating the Mother Dairies at Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, which we needed to recombine the food aid commodities for supply to the four metro cities. Creating a market in these four cities was imperative for us in order to create seventeen Anands and to organise one million farmers.

One of the tools we decided to use for the clean and efficient marketing of milk supplied by the Mother Dairies was through bulk vending machines in the metros.

I had often watched what my wife did with the milk she bought. She did what every other Indian housewife did those days – she bought the bottled milk from the Amul dairy and boiled it. At Amul we had modern pasteurisers to heat the milk up to 72.4oC for sixteen seconds to kill all the harmful bacteria but never at temperatures higher than that, so that we did not destroy the good bacteria. But our housewives boiled the milk in their homes at 100oC. In effect, they undid everything we tried to do in our dairies!

The prevailing unhygienic conditions and practices make all housewives cautious in spite of the modern technology in dairying. It means that in India pasteurisation and packaging boils down to merely prolonging the shelf life of milk.

When we were planning for Operation Flood we decided to look at these problems afresh. My colleagues and I examined what our wives and mothers were doing. These were, no doubt, traditional habits. But it was these habits that had kept us healthy because 40 per cent of our cows and buffaloes have bugs and some of these filter into the milk. Boiling safeguarded the milk and also increased its life. But then why were we pasteurising it? Why were we bottling it if it was being unbottled? Why should we transport a pound of glass with every pound of milk and bring back that pound of glass, sterilise it and put an aluminium cap on it? Why could we not provide milk in bulk through machines?

If we could do this, we could also abolish the messy milk rationing system in our cities. So cash and carry seemed the best option. This concept, of course, created a furore in Delhi. All the pundits in the government, particularly in the dairy division, were convinced that bulk vending would never work. They said: ‘You put a coin into our public telephones and you get neither the connection nor the coin back. If Kurien with his crazy schemes puts up machines for milk for the people of Delhi, and if these people get neither their coins back nor the milk, there will be

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