NDDB chairman Amrita Patel staunchly defends her strategy over a frugal meal with Surajeet Das Gupta

Five years later, it is clear that, though she still respects Kurien enormously, Patel is unwilling to play Trilby to his Svengali. In recent months, the 60-year-old veterinarian from Gujarat has been in open disagreement with Kurien over the role her organisation should play in India’s prosperous dairy business.

The differences arose over the joint ventures that the Centre’s NDDB has been signing with state milk cooperatives to market their liquid milk and value-added products like ice cream and cheese under the Mother Dairy brand name.

This has the potential of providing nationwide competition to Amul, the model Gujarat cooperative that Kurien set up with such astounding success.

Kurien has publicly criticised Patel’s move as a backdoor entry for government control in the cooperative sector. Patel, on the other hand, sees it as adjusting to new market realities.

“For Kurien cooperatives are a faith that cannot be questioned by anyone; for me it is a faith that needs to change with changing times. I think that was our difference. I am more democratic,” she said thoughtfully.

We were sitting in Sagar Ratna, a restaurant in the Ashoka, the government’s last hotel bastion, where Patel is nibbling at a paper dosa that constituted part of her breakfast at the indecent hour (for me at any rate) of 9 a m.

We had originally planned lunch, a meal that, she warned, consisted of a single slice of cheese toast. But a meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office had prompted a re-schedule.

Patel was clearly confident of her position, though she was deeply upset at Kurien’s coruscating opposition. She must have been aware that she’s in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. But she readily agreed to meet, posed for photographs and answered questions frankly.

As it turned out, there was a lot more to talk about than just the Patel-Kurien debate. She had chosen buttermilk to start with and I opted for orange juice and asked her how she came to join the “Kurien movement” that eventually helped India become the world’s largest milk producer.

“It was sheer chance,” she said. She is the daughter of H M Patel, finance minister in Morarjee Desai’s government and finance secretary in Jawaharlal Nehru’s time. When her father moved to Gujarat, near the Amul cooperative in Anand district, to teach, she followed.

One day one of her pets fell ill, and she was was forced to make a visit to Anand which had a vet posted to look after livestock. “This was my first interaction with Anand and after seeing what they were doing I was so impressed that I decided to become a vet and come back to this place to practice.”

But there was a shock in store when she came back armed with a degree. The job she so hoped to get was unavailable. “I approached Kurien, who was a friend of my father’s, and he rejected me outright, saying that women had no place there, even the receptionist at Anand was male,” she recalled.

But luck always favours the brave. She hung around Anand doing odd jobs, until opportunity struck in the form of the visit of a lady nutritionist from Scotland to work in the cattle-feed division. Her one condition was that her back-up assistant had to be a woman.

That was her break and it proved a major one. The job was temporary but Kurien’s attempts to hire a male nutritionist thereafter proved singularly unsuccessful because no one was ready to come to a place as remote as Anand. So Patel stayed.

The juice and buttermilk arrived and Patel proved true to her word: she was a frugal eater. She sipped the buttermilk and when her paper dosa arrived, she ate it at half the speed at which I demolished my masala dosa.

I had to ask her the obvious question: was Kurien a messiah, as some thought, or a dictator, as others accused? Patel’s answer suggested that it was a bit of both.

“Had it not been for the tough bull terrier that many used to call him, there was no way that he could have kept the government from interfering in the cooperatives. The interesting thing was that he was always right and we were indoctrinated to his vision.”

In the initial years of Operation Flood, there were strong lobbies against it. “The state animal husbandry department minister wanted his own men to be part of the cooperative, the cooperative minister did not want to lose his power.

Foreign experts said that we would increase malnutrition in the country by denying the milk to poor children because their families would prefer selling the milk.”

On the subject of the current controversy with Kurien, I asked her whether she had ever tried to explain her position to him. Yes, came the prompt reply, but he would not listen. “I still do not know what went wrong,” she said.

All the same, she is unwilling to take his criticism about NDDB’s monopoly intentions without a fight. “It is surprising. When Kurien is NDDB chairman, then NDDB is a non-government organisation. With Patel it becomes a government organisation that will lead to the end of farmers’ cooperative independence,” she says.

She reels off instances of how Kurien went in for joint ventures with cooperatives. “What I am doing, Kurien has already done before, so where is the problem? In West Bengal we even had a private sector partner in Keventer’s.

In his time he even superseded the Patna dairy and took control of it, then there was no opposition. We took over the management of Rajasthan Dairy and ran it for them. That was again during Kuriens’s tenure,” says Patel.

In any case, she says, Kurien’s fears are unfounded. The state federations can walk out of the arrangement whenever they want, no new assets are being created and the profits will go back to the farmers.

It has taken Patel an hour and a half to go through her meal. Now there is the buttermilk to keep us company. I decide to sip my orange juice as slowly as possible to keep the conversation going.

Did she fear multinationals coming in and dominating the dairy industry? “Yes in many states cooperatives are already tying up with the private sector to market their products. So if I don’t help them they will do it with someone else. All I am offering is an option for them to consider,” she points out.

What did she think about Kurien’s fears that she is creating an alternative brand to combat Amul through Mother Dairy? “Do you think in a country as large as India one brand is enough? In fact, if there are two strong Indian brands, multinationals will find it even more difficult. So what is wrong in my pushing the Mother Dairy brand?”

I asked her how successful her joint ventures have been. Now she beams: “We have already tied the knot with Kerala even though Kurien wrote a letter to all state governments against the move.

We are talking to Punjab and Uttar Pradesh and have made it clear to them that there is a group that opposes the idea. But they seem to have no issues with that.”

As I called for the bill, Patel narrates a small incident. The Maharashtra Co-operative Marketing Federation wanted to enter Ahmedabad. But unidentified miscreants attacked their trucks and the milk pouches were allegedly damaged.

“Is this how we should conduct business and stifle competition? We have to live and let live,” she said.

Was that a dig at her mentor? I couldn’t tell, but it’s significant that she chose to tell the story all the same.