Everyone’s knows the reach of AMUL.
The powerful imagery conjured by the sweet girl in the ad, who has something to say on everything! Behind that powerful image, we know the power of AMUL, the power it draws from its Rs 20,000+ crore annual turnover. That’s what makes it omnipresent to the consumer.
Going behind the scenes, the AMUL experiment, continuing to grow, is omnipresent for the producer too. As conceived and nurtured in Gujarat by the non-Gujarati Dr Varghese Kurien, its magic wand was to eliminate the middleman between the producer and the consumer. Every milk producer in every nook and corner of the Gujarati countryside was freed from the usurious clutches of the “beechwala” and enabled to sell directly to the coop society.
These coop societies were weaved through a chain leading to the district-level and then to the State Dairy Federation. This innovatory experiment grew and grew and still grows. Today they buy more than TWO CRORE litres of milk every day, process them into pasteurised milk, into milk powder, into cheese butter and ghee, into chocolates and snack bar. All of such international quality that half their products are exported.
The beneficial spin-offs of this huge operations is the enormous scale that gives the producers’ milk federations to cut overhead costs to benefit both the producer and the consumer. In a volatile commodity market, where prices of TOP (tomato onion potatoes) rise and crash seemingly whimsically (with a conniving nod, no doubt, from the middlemen and their mandis), prices and availability of milk and milk products has been seamlessly, noiselessly stable for last four decades. And both the producer and the consumer are happy.
THEREIN THUS LIES a lesson for our policymakers. With a continuing division of land holdings,with two thirds of rural populace being landless and another 15% also languishing as marginal owner-cultivators, with 65% of our national population living in villages but having a share of less than 20%of the national GDP, there is little doubt that small/marginal owner-cultivators and landless agri workers, if organised in coop societies that go up to District-level and State Coop Federations would scale up their level of operations such that their power to negotiate would reduce their overhead costs, and assure a fair price to both the producer and the consumer.
An AMUL like experiment in horticulture, aquaculture and forest produce would indeed spell a continuing magic for the rural world. And reforms in the rural sector would have credibility if majority of villagers see in them some potential benefits. A marginal,farmer or a landless agricultural labourer by himself would have no chance at all in the huge, partly corrosive corporate world. But hundreds upon thousands of them united and woven into a vast cooperative network, working itself all the way to the State Level Federation, would, by virtue of this huge scale, have the power to negotiate to arrive at low overhead costs and yet manage to give the consumer a fair AND stable price. Like the AMUL pattern has over the last more than 50 years.
Such a wonder can happen only if benign, well-intentioned State machinery gives the necessary push, nudge, and a protective umbrella. Which is why the 2019 (?) creation of a Ministry of Cooperation, under the care of the influential and reputedly dynamic Mr. Amit Shah,have encouraged fond hopes.
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Alok Sinha : Founder – VillageNama
