Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, often called the “Iron Man of India”, and honoured for bringing together more than 500 princely states into one country; is also considered a pioneer in leading the cooperative movement in India. Patel’s support for the Kaira farmers’ cooperative movement laid the groundwork for what became the Amul model. And this vision of cooperative organisation continues to shape India’s dairy economy, particularly women’s livelihoods.
Pioneers of a Dairy Revolution in India
In 1945, farmers in Kaira district sold their milk through a private dairy, Polson. The milk farmers were trapped in a near-total monopoly to Polson, under the Bombay Milk Scheme, which gave Polson and its network of contractors an exclusive right to purchase milk from the region. This left farmers with no alternative buyers and allowed the company to arbitrarily fix unfairly low purchase prices. The farmers, led by Tribhuvandas Patel, went to Sardar Patel. Patel advised them to stop supplying Polson, to break the monopoly and take control of their own procurement and processing. This sparked a historic 15-day milk strike in 1946 and led directly to the founding of the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union and ultimately laid the foundation for Amul and India’s White Revolution.
It was Patel’s push and vision, which helped the farmers challenge the monopoly and finally form their own cooperative system which ensured equal wages. Tribhuvandas Patel ran the union, and Verghese Kurien, who joined in 1949, turned it into a national model. Operation Flood, launched in 1970 by the National Dairy Development Board, copied the Anand pattern across the country: village societies collect the milk, district unions process it, and a state federation markets it. India has been the world’s largest milk producer since 1998 and today produces about a quarter of the world’s milk. Across the country there are 22 milk federations, 241 district unions and about 1.72 crore dairy farmers in the cooperative network.
Who does the work, and who is on the register
Though Kaira farmers did not specifically mention women, dairying is women’s work. Government figures say nearly 70 per cent of the workforce in dairy farming is women. Feeding, cleaning, milking, caring for sick animals and carrying the milk fall mostly on them. That makes the cooperative a rare institution. It pays regularly, and it comes with a membership, a vote and a share in the profit. For a woman whose farm work is otherwise counted as unpaid family labour, a steady payment for milk she produced can change what she controls in her household. The broader economy shows why this matters. India’s female labour force participation (women aged 15 and above) was 34.4 per cent in July 2026, up from 32.7 per cent in June, according to the official monthly labour force survey. Dairy is one of the few rural livelihoods where women’s work is already central and where an institution exists to pay for it.
Despite their share of the labour, women make up only about 30 to 35 per cent of the members of dairy cooperatives, according to the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) and government figures. A mid-1990s FAO paper cited women’s membership at around 16 per cent nationally, so the trend is upward. But the distance between the work done and the ownership held remains large.
However, a few successful examples are there. In Gujrat, section 74(1B) of the Gujarat Co-operative Societies Act, 1961, reserves two seats for women on the managing committee of societies made up of individual members, and the 2023 amendment to the Multi-State Co-operative Societies Act does the same for multi-state cooperatives. Women hold 80,000 seats on village society committees in Gujarat, up from 70,200 in 2020, and Amul’s managing director said in 2023 that women held about 38 percent of such seats at Amul, more than their share of members. Even the women-led societies grew from 3,764 to 4,562 between 2020 and 2025, now handle about 26 percent of the state’s milk, and have raised revenue 43 percent. Those are real gains. But they also show the ceiling: in the state that invented the model, women hold roughly a third of the memberships and a quarter of the board seats.
What is Needed Now
The next few years matter. Under White Revolution 2.0, the Ministry of Cooperation plans 75,000 new dairy societies and says this will bring “more women dairy farmers” into the organised sector. Another initiative was launched in July 2025, i.e. the Sardar Patel Cooperative Dairy Federation was launched as a multi-state federation to bring village dairy cooperatives from outside Gujarat into a national network. That means the Amul model is now being spread deliberately to new states, and the quality of those new societies will decide whether it succeeds.
And as India is now putting enormous energy into extending the cooperative model, a few things are important here. It is important to ensure membership for women along with loans, insurance and title in women’s names, payment into the woman’s own bank account, and women in the committee and the secretary’s chair. Patel’s insight is that a farmer who sells raw produce to a middleman stays poor, while a farmer who owns the processing and marketing keeps the value. For women, the same insight applies one step further. A woman who does the work but does not hold the membership, the vote or the income is still on the wrong side of the middleman. Therefore, the question is whether the woman who rises before dawn to milk is counted as the owner of what she produces. Answering that would be the most fitting way to honour what Sardar Patel started in Kaira.
Tanya Mittal and
Dr. Cchavi Vasisht
Sunday, November 1, 2026