India’s Unified Lending Interface is worth much more than it seems

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of visiting the Amul factory in Anand, Gujarat. The father of India’s White Revolution, Verghese Kurien, was my grand-uncle, and as his guests, we were given a grand tour.

As a young child, the highlight of the weekend was being able to wander through the chocolate factory, surrounded by so much molten chocolate that it had to be transported from one machine to the other in overhead pipes. I vividly recall how one of the pipes had sprung a leak and marvelled at the fact that the factory manager had strategically placed a bucket below it to catch milk chocolate as it dripped down. This was the closest I was ever going to get to Willy Wonka.

That was also when I learnt about India’s milk revolution—directly from the mouths of those who were a part of it. I was told of how my grand-uncle, in defiance of a deeply entrenched milk mafia, helped the dairy producers of the district organize themselves into a cooperative so that they could sell milk directly to customers. And how, from those humble beginnings, dairy farming became one of the largest self-sustaining industries in rural parts of India.

By offering dairy farmers a way to get directly involved in all aspects of the procurement, processing and marketing of milk, India was able to go from being a milk-starved nation to the world’s largest producer of milk by 1998. But as much as the idea of a cooperative gave dairy farmers a way to access the market, a lot remains to be done to improve their lot. India’s dairy sector is deeply fragmented, with over 70% of the country’s milk being produced by small and marginal farmers, each of whom own just 1-2 cows or buffaloes.