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A protégé with a mission
By Anoop K Menon
 Amrita Patel, who is chairman of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) came into the media spotlight following a very public spat with Dr Varghese K Kurien, the ‘milkman of India’ whose ‘white revolution’ helped India become largest producer of milk in the world.
In the media coverage, Kurien got the proverbial flowers while his one-time protégé got the brickbats. The good doctor’s status as the doyen of the co-operative milk movement in India and his single-minded commitment to improving the lot of poor dairy farmers was unquestionable. It became evil Amrita versus good Kurien, for want of information.
Doing its bit to correcting that imbalance is The Missionary, a compact 77-page booklet on Amrita Patel and NDDB by Shrinivas Pandit. Here, Patel explains how her differences with Dr Kurien diverged over time on issues like marketing, the business challenge posed by MNCs and the future of the milk co-operative movement. In the same breath, she also acknowledges that Dr Kurien’s vision and confidence in her abilities “made a businesswoman out of me.” In fact, Kurien fought Patel’s case at the level of Prime Minister’s Office to get her appointed as chairman of NDDB in 1998. Interestingly, Kurien had initially refused to employ her because the work involved traveling and staying in remote villages. But the doughty fighter that she is, Patel overcame his objections and won him over by executing a tough assignment of convincing a UK organization to partner NDDB for India’s first foot and mouth vaccine plant.
But The Missionary is more than Patel’s version of her disagreements with Kurien. The reader is left with an appreciation of what she has set out to do–looking beyond Kurien’s self-circumscribed world of milk production, cooperatives and marketing to bring in a broader sustainable development perspective, where the end objective is “to secure and strengthen the life support systems that sustain us all and the economy on which our livelihoods depend.”
Patel is attempting a tough task: to bring about a paradigm shift in India’s milk co-operative movement by expanding its scope to encompass water, forests and other elements of ecology because, “dairying in India depends substantially on the productivity of living natural resources, and therefore the loss of bio-diversity is of grave concern.” This book is about about Patel’s vision of combining the altruism of the cooperative movement with the reality of market economics to ensure that commercial viability isn’t lost sight of while serving the cause of India’s milk producers, most of whom are landless or marginal farmers. Check out this book for management takeaways of a different kind.
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