The government wants to replace Dr Verghese Kurien with its own man. This is dangerous.
HE is a man who has built up one of the most successful cooperative movements in the world. Whose efforts have turned the country self-sufficient in milk (and has made India the world's largest milk producer this year). Whose organisation has created one of the largest Indian consumer non-durable brands.
But he has always been fiercely independent. Bureaucrats have never liked him. Many politicians have hated him, especially Union agriculture ministers and Gujarat chief ministers. But no one ever managed—or had the guts—to remove Dr Verghese Kurien from his post as chairman of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB).
So now when he wants to hang up his boots, they want to make sure that he is replaced at NDDB by a person of their own choosing and not the one Kurien has groomed for succession for years. The bureaucrats want control. Over a Rs 3,200-crore asset base, over a professionally-run profitable Rs 1,094-crore organisation, with 7,800 dairy cooperatives, in 230 districts, in 22 states and Union territories.
The 77-year-old Kurien has been NDDB's chairman since its inception in 1965. His present term ends in November. In August, he wrote to the PM offering to relinquish his seat, and recommending that Dr Amrita Patel, managing director, NDDB, who he has groomed as his successor, be appointed as chairman.
NDDB is a statutory body set up by a special Act of Parliament. It has operational autonomy and has till now successfully resisted government intervention. It is run by professionals and despite being a quasi-government body, has no bureaucrat on its payroll. The government's role in NDDB is limited to the appointment of the chairman.
After receiving Kurien's letter, the government, according to convention, appointed a search committee under the chairmanship of the cabinet secretary to locate Kurien's successor. Other than cabinet secretary Prabhat Kumar, the committee consists of the principal secretary to the PM, Brajesh Mishra, animal husbandry and dairying secretary N.K. Sinha and two retired vice-chancellors, including one Dr Shanmuga Sundaram, a veterinary doctor whose principal claim to fame, allege observers, is closeness to AIADMK supremo Jayalalitha.
No, Kurien is not part of the committee.
THE committee, which hunted for heads for over a month and sent out letters to the state chief secretaries seeking a response before September 15, has now zeroed in on three probables. One is Dr Patel, a qualified vet, who has been associated with the dairy industry and NDDB for over 30 years. She is also one of only two Asians (the other is Dr Kurien) to have been named International Dairyperson of the Year by the International Dairy Federation. The other two probables are N.R. Bhasin, a recently retired IAS officer (last posting: Rajasthan's resident representative in Delhi) and J.C. Pant, also a retired bureaucrat who briefly held the post of secretary, agriculture in the United Front government.
Within NDDB, it had been taken for granted that Patel would take over as chairman as and when Dr Kurien called it a day. But the current buzz in the capital is that the search committee will recommend one of the two retired bureaucrats as its choice.
Experts see this as a move by the government to bureaucratise a perfectly functioning, profitable Indian organisation. Says former Planning Commission member L.C. Jain who has been associated with the Indian dairy movement: "According to the logic of practicality, the government should be vacating economic areas as it has failed there. And here is a profitably functioning organisation, where the government with its dubious reputation of running things, is pushing the bureaucracy in." Says an international dairy expert associated with NDDB: "Unfortunately, there is a tendency in India to push generalists where you need experts.
They not only bring disrepute to the country and organisation because of their ignorance of the subject, but also ruin the future of perfect organisa-tions. NDDB under a bureaucrat might go much the same way." A simple comparison between a government-controlled cooperative dairy and NDDB may be revealing. The Delhi Milk Scheme (DMS) employs four times the people that NDDB's Mother Dairy employs, and produces one-fourth the milk that Mother Dairy does per day. DMS runs at a loss, Mother Dairy at a profit. Says the international dairy expert: "Interestingly, apart from the initial Rs 50,000 given during the setting up of the board, the board has arranged for all its finances on its own and is even paying back its share to the government rather than eating into the already-burdened national exchequer."
While across the world, the dairy business is dominated by MNCs, in India, cooperatives under the NDDB umbrella have the largest marketshare (over 30 per cent). Despite many disputes, criticisms and controversies which have marked the evolution of Operation Flood, the project with which NDDB revolutionised the Indian dairy sector, the fact remains that Amul and Mother Dairy, brands promoted by NDDB, have not only become household names but also marks of quality for milk and milk products across India.
This year, mainly due to NDDB's efforts, milk production in the country is expected to increase by a whopping 49 per cent, making India the world's largest milk producing country at 74 million tonnes, three million more than the United States.
Experts say that one of the secrets of NDDB's success has been the pugnacious Kurien's ability to keep the bureaucracy away from the board's functioning. He has also successfully resisted repeated efforts by Central and state politicians to use NDDB's resources to meet their own narrow political ends. NDDB's massive financial and asset base of over Rs 3,200 crore can easily tempt people alien to the spirit of the cooperative dairy enterprise to fiddle with it.
Today, NDDB is at a critical phase of its growth. Post-liberalisation, competition has increased several fold. Multinational corporations are pegging away at NDDB's marketshare. The need of the hour, clearly, is to keep the organisation motivated and to strengthen it. Would a former bureaucrat brought in from outside right at NDDB's helm help that objective? Says Jain: "The state as an instrument of economic development has not performed the task that it should perform. There is hardly an example of a bureaucracy-led organisation which has run profitably for 30 years." Indeed, there is resentment right from within the council of ministers over the issue. Senior leaders and cabinet ministers have written to the prime minister expressing their concern over the prospects of having a bureaucrat as the head of NDDB.
Amongst them are former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda, commerce minister Ramakrishna Hegde and textiles minister Kanshi Ram Rana. Wrote Rana: "It is necessary that the government does not... experiment with putting bureaucrats or IAS officers or a political person as successor to Dr Kurien." This is Hegde: "NDDB's autonomy and its ability to pursue its goals without interference was more than a matter of statute. It was inherent in the very nature of NDDB and its lead-ership. ..It would, in my opinion be an error to look beyond NDDB for a new chairman, which could certainly be viewed adversely by those who question the government's sensitivity to the needs of our rural people."
Of course, Kurien will continue to loom large over India's dairy sector. He will remain chairman of Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (NDDB's marketing arm) and the National Cooperative Dairy Federation of India. But bureaucratic complications could have a serious effect on the five-decade-old movement which has one crore members. Perhaps Jain describes the situation best: "NDDB's example should be followed to reform the government. Instead, we have the government trying to change NDDB to fit its own image."