The ouster on March 20 of octogenerian Dr. Verghese Kurien from the chairmanship of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) following withdrawal of confidence in him by constituent members of GCMMF, marks the end of a momentous success story in the history of post-independence India’s failed national development effort. Regrettably the reams of comment in the media has not adequately acknowledged Kurien’s contribution to the white revolution which transformed chronically lactose deficient India into the world’s largest producer of milk within a mere three decades.

It is insufficiently appreciated that in sharp contrast with the Gandhian ideal of low-tech self-sufficiency in village republics, Kurien engineered an indigenous white revolution through massive infusion of sophisticated technology into rural India. Way back in the 1950s when heavily subsidised European farmers with huge surpluses of milk and dairy products were about to dump them upon starving Indians, fearing a crash in the already low prices of domestic milk and dairy produce, Kurien prevailed upon prime minister Nehru to canalise import of dairy food aid through the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), an apex level consultancy and project engineering organisation also founded by Kurien. These imports were cautiously sold in urban markets to create a corpus for NDDB, which then utilised it to develop a sophisticated indigenous dairy machinery and equipment manufacturing industry.

This was discerned as necessary by Kurien because of the peculiar seasonal production cycle of Indian milch cattle which lactate heavily in the winter months and run dry during hot summers. This resulted in wide price variations with milk prices dropping below cost in winters and going through the roof in summer. Kurien’s genius was that he persuaded farmers of the Kaira district to promote farmer-owned dairy cooperatives which would pay steady year-round prices for milk through the expedient of purchasing their full winter production, and utilising sophisticated technology to convert it into milk powder. In summer the milk powder was recombinated into milk assuring urban consumers steady supply at farmer-determined prices.

Yet the secret of Kurien’s success was the chain-length cooperative model designed by him. The feature of this model is that the unit member of each cooperative — the farmer — controls every operation along the chain, i.e production, distribution and marketing.

It is this whole-chain ownership of cooperatives by India’s perpetually short-changed farmers which Dr. Amrita Patel, chairperson of NDDB and directors of the GCMMF board are endangering with their proposal for corporatisation of milk cooperatives. According to Kurien this would be tantamount to returning to square one.

This is the essentially correct argument that the modernisers led by Dr. Patel, have not fully grasped. With mega corporates preparing to enter the agri-business sector, GCMMF needs to stick with its tried and tested model of farmers’ ownership of whole-chain operations. In this case better is likely to prove the enemy of good. GCMMF certainly ain’t broke; so there’s no need to fix it.

No shortcuts to equal opportunity
If translated into action, the declaration of intent by Union minister for human resource development Arjun Singh to reserve an additional 27 percent of seats in IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) and Central universities for OBCs (Other Backward Castes), could well sound the death knell of India’s few surviving institutions of academic excellence. This new caste-based reservation order, cynically timed to coincide with assembly polls in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Pondicherry, will be in addition to the existent 22.5 percent reserved quota for scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs). It translates into 49.5 percent of capacity in Central government-promoted institutions of higher education being allocated on considerations other than merit.

There is a general societal consensus that reservation or positive discrimination in favour of the historically discriminated SCs and STs in institutions of higher education and in government jobs is justified. But to classify over 3,000 other castes (as listed in the Mandal Commission Report of 1980) as equally backward and meriting similar reservation is an altogether different proposition. For one, many of the castes listed in 1980 as OBCs far from being ‘backward’, are in fact dominant land-owing castes in several parts of the country. Therefore caste as the criterion of backwardness is outdated.

Yet at the same time it needs to be more widely acknowledged that media hype about admissions-on-merit is somewhat overdone. The commonly fudged truth is that the overwhelming majority of ‘meritorious’ students who top the IIM, IIT and medical and engineering entrance exams of the state governments are from urban elites which can afford the expensive entrance exam tuition dispensed by exclusive private coaching institutes. Thus by paying their way, they access institutes of excellence heavily subsidised by the poor.

The prime objective of government should be to upgrade institutions of higher education by creating conditions conducive to research and innovation, rather than dumb them down. It can simultaneously serve the cause of backward castes and classes by sharply upgrading the quality of primary and secondary education in government schools, and promoting subsidised coaching institutes for government school leavers to enable them to compete with private school students on an equal footing when writing competitive public entrance exams.

In short, the policy formula for subserving the twin objectives of continuous upgradation of institutions of higher education and facilitating access of historically discriminated and disadvantaged castes and classes is to strengthen public schools and schooling systems. But that’s a long hard road. Hence the resort to the quick-fix option of caste quotas in institutions of academic excellence, even to their detriment.