In his brief tenure of eighteen months—from May 1964 to January 1966—Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri laid the foundation for India’s Green Revolution and played a crucial role in the White Revolution. He also led India to its first victory against Pakistan in the battlefield—the 1965 war. He gave India the stirring slogan of Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. The spot where his memorial is built is appropriately called Vijay Ghat.
Shastri’s home in Delhi at 1, Motilal Nehru Marg, now called the Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial, displays his few material possessions, photographs with visiting dignitaries, besides some vignettes from his early years in Mughalsarai, Varanasi, and Allahabad (now Prayagraj). However, little attention has been given to the six institutions established by him—each with a lasting impact on India’s political economy.
Shastri’s tenure saw the establishment of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), Food Corporation of India (FCI), Border Security Force (BSF), Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
As 2025 marks the 60th year of these institutions, it is a good time to introspect if they have lived up to the expectations with which they were founded. Naturally, over the years, the ecosystem and context have witnessed a major change. The question is: are these institutions keeping pace with the times and the expectations which their stakeholders have from them?
Let’s first start with the most successful and prominent among them—the Anand–based NDDB, which is today the lodestar of India’s cooperative movement. Founded in 1965 under the chairmanship of Verghese Kurien, it received statutory status in 1987 under the NDDB Act.
It is a good coincidence that the UN has declared 2025 as the International Year of Cooperatives. This also gives us an opportunity to critically evaluate the role played by NDDB in mobilising farmers and primary producers into cooperatives, farmer producer organisations, and ‘producer companies’ under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013.
The NDDB supports not only milk but also edible oils, millets, organic produce, fruits, and green energy. The most prominent brand associated with the NDDB group is Amul, which has a turnover of Rs 90,000 crore. Its closest competition is Nandini, a brand under the Karnataka Milk Federation (KMF) cooperative, with an annual turnover of Rs 23,000 crore, followed by Mother Dairy at Rs 15,037 crore. These three top brands are way ahead of their closest corporate competitor, Nestle, whose milk and milk products division has a turnover of around Rs 7,600 crore. As such, price discovery and price realisation in the milk and associated sectors are primarily determined by cooperatives promoted by the NDDB.
The genesis
While visiting Anand, Gujarat, on 31 October 1964, the birthday of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Lal Bahadur Shastri spent the night at the home of dairy farmer Ramanbhai Punjabbhai Patel. His discussions with the villagers convinced him of the virtues of the cooperative dairy model established by Tribhuvandas K Patel and managed efficiently by Verghese Kurien.
The next morning, Shastri said to Kurien, “I have put the most competent and experienced officers from the IAS in our milk cooperatives. In spite of this, nowhere do we see similar success. In what way are you different?”
To this, Kurien replied, “Sir, in Kheda, I am an employee of the farmers. If I fail, they can fire me. In other cases, farmers are the ‘subjects’ of the government official controlling their society.”
Shastri smiled in agreement. “Dr Kurien, you have to help me do what you are doing nationwide. I want you to head the National Development Board,” he said.
Kurien agreed, but put forward two conditions. “First, I will not ‘join’ NDDB, and will continue to remain an employee of the Kheda Milk Co-operative. Secondly, I would not like to move to Delhi, and therefore the NDDB headquarters would have to be in Anand.”
Shastri accepted both these demands. Thus, Anand became the epicentre of this cooperative movement. The incredibly long tenure of NDDB’s helmsman, Kurien, from 1965 to 1998 helped set in place systems and processes that have stood the test of time. The organisation now had the benefit of learning from its successes and failures in a wide range of geographies and demographics—there were milk unions in the Himalayas and the foothills, in desert regions, in irrigated as well as unirrigated tracts, in women-headed households, and in hamlets where patriarchy was deeply entrenched.
Kurien handed the mantle to his erstwhile protégé, Amrita Patel (toward the end they sparred bitterly), who also had a tenure of 16 long years. In 2014, T Nanda Kumar, former food and agriculture secretary, was appointed as NDDB’s chairman, but he resigned before completing five years. He was followed by Dilip Rath who had joined as the MD of NDDB after resigning from the IAS. After five years, the interim charge was held by Varsha Joshi, joint secretary in the union fisheries, animal husbandry and dairying ministry, who continues to be on the Board in an ex-officio capacity. Currently, Meenesh C Shah is the chairman and managing director of NDDB.
Also read: Nothing like deviation in democracy. Even Lenin & Stalin adapted: Lal Bahadur Shastri
The core principles
While there have been several changes over the six decades in terms of technology, logistics, and support services, the core principles have been retained. From the very beginning, Kurien had insisted that whatever milk is brought for procurement should be accepted—no minima or maxima were prescribed—and so women-headed households with school-going children and just one cow may give less than a litre of milk, while those who had more cattle could contribute more than ten litres as well. All milk was measured and tested—each lot was tested using a centrifuge machine—and the price was determined on the basis of ‘solid’ and ‘fat’ content of the milk, thereby disincentivising any admixture with water.
Farmers were provided not just with technical inputs, but were also given training on how to conduct and manage the affairs of their society—from elections and accounts to governance at the primary, district, and apex levels. It comes as no surprise then that compared to cooperatives in any other domain, the salience of the milk producer cooperative societies has reigned supreme.
Over the years, NDDB took up other project-based activities in the agribusiness domain—from edible oils to Mother Dairy, fruits and vegetables (SAFAL), immunologicals, and agribusiness management. NDDB has encouraged its affiliated organisations to be flexible in its strategic outreach. Realising that as a brand, Amul must have a pan-India presence, it has also encouraged strategic tie-ups with large aggregators and processors to ensure its brand presence in all metros and Tier-I and Tier-II cities of the country.
But this is not all. NDDB keeps expanding its domain to everything connected with the farmers—for while it is one thing to get into an economy of scale, it has moved beyond scale to get into scope.
The NDDB’s latest initiative is a joint venture named Mrida (meaning earth in Sanskrit) with the Suzuki R&D Center India. Its aim is to expand biogas plants across India. Here is a connection between two apparently unrelated sectors: dairying and automobiles. This will create more value for dairy farmers through the efficient utilisation of dung to produce clean energy and organic fertilisers.
This is a circular economy in practice—every element in the chain is an input for another process—and there is no such thing as waste. The NDDB is collaborating with ISRO to track fodder resources, supporting startups in hydroponic fodder production, and ensuring that over fifty million milk producers in agriculture are part of a value chain in which they have a stake in ownership, control, and profits.
The NDDB has had its share of failures. The Safal National exchange—an attempt to break the stranglehold of the APMCs—floundered while some subsidiary companies had to close down. It required government fiat to ensure that NDDB came within the ambit of CAG, CVC, and the RTI. The argument that farmers organisations should be subjected only to the control of their members is fine with respect to the cooperatives, but NDDB is also one of the largest cooperative funding institutions in the country.
Later this year, in the week leading to the birth anniversary of Lal Bahadur Shastri, NDDB will be among the six institutions whose legacy will be discussed, not just in a self-congratulatory mode, but also about what needs to be done in the coming decades to evolve new strategies even when the core principles of cooperative philosophy remain firmly etched.
This is the first article in a series on Lal Bahadur Shastri and the institutions he helped establish.
Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.
Disclosure: The columnist is a trustee of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial (LBS Museum).
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)