Today is the birthday of one of the main architects of the dairy co-op movement in India who founded Amul along with Verghese Kurian. Tribhuvandas Patel was the man who brought in Kurien, a dairy engineer to execute the idea of Amul. Union Minister Amit Shah and others have remembered Patel’s contributions on his birthday.
Shah wrote, “ Freedom fighter Tribhuvandas Patel took the idea of the cooperative way of dairy production to remote villages and established Amul. History remembers him as a man who founded Amul”.
Among other things, GCMMF also remembered Patel by launching an Amul Topical. Patel was the founder of the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union in 1946, and later the Amul co-operative movement in Anand, Gujarat, India. He was a freedom fighter and a committed follower of Gandhi.
By the late 1940s, he started working with farmers in Kheda district, under the guidance of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and after setting up the Union, he hired a young manager named Verghese Kurien in 1950, who had since become synonymous with Amul, for his leadership of the co-operative movement.
Patel is known as one of the great pioneers of the cooperative movement in India.