Google is celebrating Verghese Kurien’s 94th birth anniversary with its doodle.
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Popularly often known as the “Milkman of India”, his work in framing the milk cooperative helped empower milkmen throughout the nation not exclusively yield extra but in addition offered the infrastructure for higher storage thus considerably decreasing wastage of milk.
The doodle shows Kurien with a milk can in his hand, next to a buffalo with a looped rope on the ground spelling out “Google”.
He was appointed as founder-chairman of National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in 1965 by the then prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. Kurien was also the man behind the creation and success of “Amul” which deals with a multitude of dairy products. Dr Kurien is man behind organisations like Amul and Anand Milk co-operative.
Born on November 26, 1921 in Kozhikode, Kerala, Kurien – who was destined to become India’s top “milkman” – graduated from Loyola College in 1940 and later completed his engineering from Guindy College of Engineering, Chennai. After a stint at TISCO, Jamshedpur, he obtained the Govt. of India’;s scholarship to study Dairy Engineering. And the many epithets he got accustomed with: Father of the White Revolution, the Milkman of India, and Architect of Operation Flood.
On its part, on Thursday, Amul inserted full-page advertisements in newspapers recalling the journey of Dr Kurien to Anand and his contribution subsequently to make Amul possible.
After 65 years, through the efforts of Kurien, the number reached to 16,100 with 3.2 million milk producers pouring millions of tonnes of milk into the GCCMF containers twice a day.
Dr Verghese Kurien was awarded Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India.
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Verghese Kurien died on 9 September 2012 in Nadiad, near Anand in Gujarat. Kurien made a decision to stay back for a few more days and stayed there forever.
