The Anand Model

The Anand Model

For every rupee you pay for Amul milk, 80 paise goes back to the farmer.
In most private dairies, in India and abroad, the farmer gets closer to 35.

That number is the entire reason this case study exists.

In 1946, a group of farmers in Anand, Gujarat went on strike against Polson dairy.
Polson had a near-monopoly on milk in their region.
It bought from the farmers for almost nothing and re-sold to the cities at many times the price.
The farmers asked for a fair rate. Polson refused.
So they went on strike for 15 days.
Not a single drop of milk left their villages.

When the strike ended, they did not go back.
They built their own cooperative.
Sardar Patel told them how.
Tribhuvandas Patel agreed to lead it.
Verghese Kurien walked in a few years later and helped scale it.

You probably know it by another name.
Amul.

This is the part people stop at. The founding story.

The part nobody tells is what happened next.

Polson did not lose because Amul's milk was better.
Polson lost because its founder had no one to pass the company on to.
By the 1970s, his children had moved away.
The company was sold off. It ended up making leather. The Polson name slowly disappeared from shelves.

One family lost interest. The brand died.

Amul, in the same eight years, had 3.6 million farmer families with a stake in keeping it alive.
The cooperative still belongs to them.

I think about this often.

What actually held it together was not the cooperative idea. It was the fact that no one had a reason to sell.

Amul doodh peeta hai India

Today, the Amul brand crosses one lakh crore rupees in revenue.
The structure is older than independent India itself.
80 paise of every rupee still goes back to the farmer.

Polson tried to come back in 2012.
One small shop in Colaba, Mumbai.
Almost nobody noticed.

Eighty years is a long time to keep paying farmers.

But it turns out, it is an even longer time to forget what you owned.

✍🏻 Mantra Joshi

Spotted a wrong number or something out of date? Tell me and I'll fix it.