Inspired by India’s Freedom Struggle: Amul - The Brand, The Revolution, and The Campaign

In a small town called Anand in western India in 1946 farmers were having a difficult time having to deal with the exploitative trade practices followed by the local trade cartel. Refusing to be cowed down by the cartel, farmers of this area went on a milk strike. And they approached the great Indian patriot Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel for a solution. His advice was natural, start a cooperative movement.

And they did.

Inspired by India’s freedom struggle, it all began when farmers in a small town near Anand city in Gujarat made milk as a symbol of protest. Tribhuvandas Patel was a local leader who had been imprisoned number of times during India’s struggle for freedom. With the help of his supporters, he found a dairy co-operative in 1946 in Anand. The cooperative movement was a movement against the atrocities of Polson Dairy, a locally-owned dairy in Anand, which procured milk from farmers at very low rates to sell to the Bombay (now Mumbai) government.

28 year old Mechanical Engineer from Kerala, Verghese Kurien arrived in Anand in 1949 as a government employee to manage a dairy. Fed up with his monotonous and unchallenging job he had already made up his mind to leave but upon Tribhuvandas Patel’s request he agreed to stay back for few months to oversee installation of the newly ordered machineries. No one then knew that Dr. Kurien would never leave Anand and make it the milk capital of India. In 1955 Amul (then short for Anand Milk Union Ltd) was born. Verghese Kurien was in almost every way the architect of Amul. He went from helping farmers repair their machinery to revolutionising the Indian dairy industry by scripting Operation Flood, a cooperative movement that turned India from a net importer of milk into one of the world’s largest producers. Not for nothing was Dr. Verghese Kurien called the Milkman of India.

The first dairy, Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union, which created Amul in 1955, handed over the brand name to Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) in 1973. Thus, in 1973 the GCMMF was established to market milk and milk products manufactured by six district cooperative unions of Gujarat.



Branding played a major role for Amul’s success, the (original) Amul Girl was created by Sylvester daCunha (daCunha Communications) to counter the Polson dairy girl. Polson’s sexy village belle didn’t stand a chance to the tubby little moppet in the polka-dotted dress and a matching ribbon. Amul ads were cleverly designed to add a tinge of nationalism to an essentially rural revolution. The first Amul Ad campaign came in 1967 in Bombay (now Mumbai). And the response was phenomenal... and continues to be. Amul is also credited with a Guinness world record for longest running ad campaign of the world for its Utterly Butterly girl portraying day-to-day issues since 1967. In 1977, the Amul story was showcased through a Hindi movie titled Manthan directed by Shyam Benegal starring Naseeruddin Shah, Girish Karnad, Smita Patil and Amrish Puri which also won National award for best film. The movie again demonstrated the power of collective might as the movie was financed by a contribution of Rs. 2 by 5 lakh farmers.

And then, Amul became a brandname in its own right. It is said that for Operation Flood, Kurien’s idea of having farmers own the brand went a long way in creating a sense of ownership and, in turn, responsibility for the product’s quality. Since the mid-90s, Amul has been able to take the range outside the security of traditional products, milk powder and butter. Amul diversified to everything from ice-cream, curd to long-life flavoured milk. Brand Amul is now present in over 50 countries.



Amul has come a long way since its inception. The contribution of Amul in development of rural India as well as economic growth of the nation is legendary.