10. Dr. Verghese Kurien, father of White Revolution
He was the man behind Operation Flood, that brought about milk revolution in India.
The Anand pattern experiment at Amul, a single cooperative dairy, was the engine behind the success of the program.
Kurien, a mechanical engineer, was half-heartedly working at Anand to serve his scholarship bond period, when he came in touch with Tribhuvandas Patel, who had launched the Anand cooperative.
Kurien revealed he once went with Indian officials to Nestle in Europe to seek their help in revolutionizing milk production in India, but was laughed at.
His buddy H M Dalaya invented the process of making skimmed milk powder and condensed milk from buffalo milk, whereas Nestle was using the process only for cow milk.
In 1965, the then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri while inspecting the Anand milk facility hugged Kurien and gave him the charge of National Dairy Development Board.
Operation Flood took India from being a milk-deficient nation, to the largest milk producer in the world, surpassing the United States of America in 1998, with about 17 percent of global output in 2010–11, which in 30 years doubled the milk available to every person.
He made the country self-sufficient in edible oils too later on, taking head-on the powerful and entrenched oil supplying lobby. Kurien, who died at the age of 90, is hailed as the “Milkman of India”.
He was an atheist.
Kurien won several awards including the Padma Vibhushan, the World Food Prize and the Magsaysay Award for community leadership.
