• Union Minister Amit Shah unveiled ‘White Revolution 2.0’, a comprehensive initiative aimed at empowering women farmers and creating job opportunities.

The programme focuses on four key areas:

i) Empowering women farmers

ii) Enhancing local milk production

iii) Strengthening dairy infrastructure

iv) Boosting dairy exports. 

• The programme is one of the three initiatives undertaken in the first 100 days of the Modi government’s third term.

• India is the world’s largest milk producing nation and provides livelihood to more than eight crore farmers.

• Dairy is the single largest agricultural commodity contributing 5 per cent of the national economy.

• Maximum women are engaged in the dairy sector, with some generating business worth Rs 60,000 crore in Gujarat alone. This new initiative will focus on empowering women and further strengthening the fight against malnutrition.

• Under White Revolution 2.0, the government aims to increase milk procurement by dairy cooperative societies by 50 per cent over the next five years.

• The plan involves setting up and strengthening 1,00,000 new and existing district cooperative societies, multi-purpose district cooperative societies, and multi-purpose Primary Agriculture Credit Societies (M-PACS), which will be linked to milk routes with necessary infrastructure.

• Initially, the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) will fund the initiative from its own resources, providing Rs 40,000 per M-PACS to 1,000 M-PACS.

A journey from milk deficient nation to milk surplus nation

• During the 1950s and 1960s, India was a milk-deficit nation dependent on imports.

• The country produced less than 21 million tonnes of milk per annum despite having the largest cattle population in the world.

• In 1950-51, per capita consumption of milk in the country was only 124 grams per day. By 1970 this figure had dropped to 107 grams per day, one of the lowest in the world and well below the minimum recommended nutritional standards.

• Following the visit of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to the Anand district of Gujarat in 1964, the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) was created with a mandate to support the creation of the ‘Anand Pattern’ of dairy cooperatives across the country.

• The ‘Anand Pattern’ was essentially a cooperative structure comprising village-level Dairy Cooperative Societies (DCSs), which promote district-level unions, which in turn promote state-level marketing federation. 

• The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) was founded in 1965 to replace exploitation with empowerment, tradition with modernity, stagnation with growth, transforming dairying into an instrument for the development of India's rural people.

• Dr. Verghese Kurien was the founder chairman of NDDB from 1965 to 1998. He is the architect of India’s ‘White Revolution’, which helped India emerge as the largest milk producer in the world.

• In 1970, India set in motion the ‘White Revolution’, the world’s biggest dairy development programme. It is also known as ‘Operation Flood’.

• It transformed the dairy-deficient nation into the global leader in milk production. For the millions living in rural India, milk farming became the largest source of employment and income.

• The Operation Flood programme was implemented by the National Dairy Development Board in three phases between 1970-1996 which connected the rural milk producers to the urban consumers through the network of dairy cooperatives. 

• It assisted in establishing 73,000 village milk producers’ cooperatives in 170 milk sheds. Notably 9 million milk producing households came under the fold of Operation Flood.

• Operation Flood is considered as the world’s largest food and development programme. 

• Operation Flood helped to sell quality milk to consumers across 700 towns and cities through a National Milk Grid. 

• Further, it has also contributed to an increase of 40 million tonnes in milk production and there was an annual estimated gain of about Rs 30,000 crore due to the programme.

• In three decades (1980s, 1990s and 2000s), the daily milk consumption in the country rose from a low of 107 grams per person in 1970 to over 226 grams per person in 2002.

• The programme also helped remove the need for middlemen, thereby reducing seasonal price variations. 

• The cooperative structure made the whole exercise of production and distribution of milk and milk products economically viable for farmers to undertake on their own. 

• It also ended India’s dependence on imported milk solids. Not only was the nation equipped to meet its local dairy needs, but it also started exporting milk powder to many foreign countries. 

• Genetic improvement of milking animals also increased due to cross-breeding. 

• As the dairy industry modernised and expanded, around 10 million farmers started earning their income from dairy farming.

• After Operation Flood, the Indian dairy and animal husbandry sector emerged as a primary source of income for a huge number of rural households – most of them either landless, small or marginal farmers. 

• Today, India holds the place of pride of having been the largest milk-producing country in the world.

• Since 2001, June 1 has been observed as World Milk Day by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations to acknowledge the importance of milk as a global food and to celebrate the dairy sector. In India, the birthday of Dr. Verghese Kurien, on November 26, is observed as National Milk Day.

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