Participating in a Webinar on the late Tribhuvandas Patel, Union Minister Parshottam Rupala said Shri Patel had a magnetic personality that attracted the likes of Verghese Kurien and others which ultimately led to the birth of a brand we proudly call “Taste of India”.
Calling him Tribhuvan Kaka, Rupala said that it fills our hearts with pride that a man like him belonged to our region. “Tribhuvan Kaka had a visionary outlook as he saw how the villages of Gujarat and that of India, could be transformed with the idea of dairy cooperatives”, underlined Rupala.
Rupala said this while participating virtually in a Webinar on Tribhuvandas Patel – The Father of Milk Cooperatives in India. The Webinar was organized by Verghese Kurien Centre of Excellence IRMA (VKCOE-IRMA) and Gujarat Chapter of Indian Dairy Association.
Those present in the webinar included National Dairy Development Board Chairman Meenesh Shah, GCMMF Chairman and MD Ramsinh & R S Sodhi, IRMA Director Umakant Dash, Amul MD Amit Vyas, and others.
Drawing a parallel between Mahatma Gandhi and Tribhuvan Patel, Rupala said while Gandhi set up an ashram in South Africa to help the needy Patel’s Foundation set up in Anand is helping the poor women with health care. Rupala spoke in chaste Gujarati.
It bears recall that Tribhuvandas Patel was 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.
“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”, Union Minister Amit Shah paid his tributes to him earlier.
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.
When he voluntarily retired from the Chairmanship of AMUL, in the early 1970s, he was presented with a purse of six hundred thousand rupees, by the grateful members of the village cooperatives — one rupee per member being the contribution.
He used this fund to start a charitable trust, named the Tribhuvandas Foundation – an NGO to work on women and child health in the Kheda district. He was the first Chairman of the Tribhuvandas Foundation. He handed over the chairmanship to Verghese Kurien later.
Patel is known as one of the great pioneers of the cooperative movement in India.
