How the National Dairy Development Board Empowers Indian Dairy Farmers

In 1964, India’s Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri visited a small village cooperative near Anand, Gujarat, and was so moved by what he saw – farmers in charge of their own milk, their own pricing, their own futures – that he resolved to take that model to every corner of the country. What followed was one of the most remarkable institutional stories in post-independence India: the creation of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), and with it, a transformation that took a milk-starved nation to the top of global dairy production.

Origins and mission of NDDB 🔗

When India gained independence, its dairy sector was in poor shape. Per capita milk availability had fallen to just 107 grams per day by 1970 – well below the minimum recommended nutritional standards. The industry was largely unorganised, dominated by middlemen who controlled pricing and kept profits away from the actual producers. Small farmers had no bargaining power and no reliable market access.

The solution, Shastri believed, lay in the Anand cooperative model pioneered by the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union – the precursor to what the world now knows as Amul. That model had turned ordinary milk producers into owners of a thriving enterprise. The NDDB was founded in 1965 with a clear mandate: to replicate that success at a national scale, replacing exploitation with empowerment and stagnation with growth.

Dr. Verghese Kurien, who had been instrumental in building Amul’s cooperative framework, was appointed the first chairman of NDDB. He brought with him not just management expertise, but a philosophy – that development works best when the people it is meant to serve are the ones running it. The Board’s founding mission was therefore not merely about increasing milk output; it was about putting dairy development firmly in the hands of milk producers themselves.

The Anand Pattern: a cooperative model built on farmer ownership 🔗

The structural backbone of NDDB’s mission was what came to be known as the “Anand Pattern” – a three-tier cooperative structure. At the base sits the village-level Dairy Cooperative Society (DCS), where individual farmers pool their milk. Above it is the district-level union, which handles milk processing. At the apex is the state-level marketing federation, which sells products to consumers. Each tier performs a distinct function: procurement and services by the village society, processing by the district union, and marketing by the state federation, creating an integrated and self-sustaining system.

This structure was designed from the ground up to cut out intermediaries. Before NDDB, traders set prices and farmers accepted whatever they were given. Under the Anand Pattern, cooperatives returned the profits directly to members. Cooperatives were ultimately able to return 80 percent of the retail price of milk to farmers, giving them capital to invest, grow, and improve their herds. That fundamental shift – from exploited supplier to empowered owner – is what NDDB set out to replicate across India.

Operation Flood and the National Milk Grid 🔗

If NDDB’s founding was the vision, Operation Flood was the execution. Launched in 1970, it became the world’s largest dairy development programme and the engine of what historians now call India’s “White Revolution.” A National Milk Grid was created to link milk producers throughout India with consumers in over 700 towns and cities, reducing seasonal and regional price variations while ensuring that producers received fair market prices on a regular basis.

The programme ran for 26 years across three distinct phases, each building on the last.

Phase I (1970-1980): laying the foundation 🔗

Phase I was financed through the sale of skimmed milk powder and butter oil donated by the European Economic Community (EEC) through the World Food Programme. This was a clever piece of economic strategy: instead of dumping food aid on Indian markets – which would have undercut local producers – NDDB directed it to urban centres where demand outstripped supply, then used the sale proceeds to build dairy infrastructure in rural production zones. It linked 18 of India’s major milksheds with consumers in the four metropolitan cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai, while establishing Mother Dairies in each metro as the urban retail touchpoint.

Phase II (1981-1985): scaling the network 🔗

Phase II expanded the number of milksheds from 18 to 136, with 290 urban markets now serving as milk distribution outlets. By the end of 1985, a self-sustaining network of 43,000 village cooperatives had come into existence, covering 4.25 million milk producers. Domestic milk powder production surged from 22,000 tonnes before the project to 140,000 tonnes by 1989, with all of that increase coming directly from dairies established under Operation Flood. For the first time, India was producing enough milk powder domestically to reduce its dependence on expensive imports.

Phase III (1985-1996): consolidation and inclusion 🔗

Phase III added 30,000 new dairy cooperatives to the 42,000 existing societies, extended veterinary first-aid services, feed supply, and artificial insemination to cooperative members, and significantly increased the participation of women in dairy cooperative societies. By 1996, the programme had secured income for nearly 10 million farmers, with roughly 75,000 village cooperatives supplying an average of 10,900 metric tonnes of milk daily. The programme had more than doubled per capita milk availability in India and, in the words of a 1997 World Bank report, served as a 20-year confirmation of a rural development vision.

What Operation Flood actually changed 🔗

The numbers alone tell a compelling story, but the real transformation was structural. The cooperative structure made the whole exercise of milk production and distribution economically viable for farmers to undertake on their own. It ended India’s reliance on imported dairy products. The country went from being a chronic milk-deficit nation to becoming the world’s largest milk producer in 1998, surpassing the United States with about 22 percent of global output by 2018. More importantly, dairy farming became India’s largest self-sustainable rural employment generator, providing income to over 80 million rural households, the majority of them small and marginal farmers.

NDDB’s role in technological advancements 🔗

NDDB has never positioned itself purely as an institutional body that facilitates paperwork and policy. From the beginning, it has functioned as a technology partner to cooperatives, making modern tools available to farmers who would otherwise have had no access to them.

Animal breeding and genetics 🔗

One of the most consequential areas of NDDB’s technical work has been improving the genetic quality of India’s dairy herds. Under the National Dairy Plan Phase I, NDDB implemented a project developing genomic selection methodology for Indian cattle breeds. A customised medium-density genotyping chip called “INDUSCHIP” was developed by NDDB and used to genotype nearly 9,576 cattle, enabling the selection of high-quality male calves based on genomic breeding values. This kind of precision breeding, once available only to large commercial farms in wealthy countries, was now being deployed in the service of India’s smallholder cooperatives.

In 2020, NDDB’s subsidiary NDDB Dairy Services went further. It developed an indigenous technology for sex-sorting bovine sperm, ensuring the birth of only female calves – a breakthrough previously available only through multinational companies at prohibitive cost. Since female calves are the productive animals in a dairy operation while male calves generate little economic return, this technology has significant implications for farmer income. It also contributes to reducing the stray cattle problem across the country.

Feed, nutrition, and animal health 🔗

NDDB’s research in animal nutrition has produced several innovations that improve milk yield without requiring farmers to invest heavily in expensive inputs. These include bypass protein feed and urea-molasses mineral blocks, which improve the nutritional efficiency of dairy animals. NDDB also developed a vaccine for Theileriosis, a tick-borne disease that causes significant livestock losses in India. NDDB’s current priorities include enhancing milk productivity through improved animal genetics and promoting climate-resilient dairying and clean milk production.

Digital integration and traceability 🔗

As India’s dairy economy grows in complexity, NDDB has moved to integrate digital technology into milk procurement and supply chain management. This includes real-time milk quality testing at collection points, electronic payment systems for farmers, and traceability tools that track milk from farm to consumer. The integration of digital technology in milk procurement and traceability is now a stated NDDB priority, reflecting the Board’s understanding that data and transparency are as important to cooperative health as cold chains and processing capacity.

Sustainability and the biogas initiative 🔗

NDDB has also taken its mandate into environmental sustainability. In October 2020, the NDDB launched a manure management initiative installing biogas plants at dairy cooperative households in Anand district, generating cooking fuel from cow dung while producing bio-slurry that farmers can use as a soil conditioner or sell as organic fertiliser. This initiative is now being expanded to 250 district dairy cooperatives across India, turning what was once agricultural waste into a source of energy and additional income.

The Ready-to-Use Culture Plant: a recent milestone 🔗

In July 2025, NDDB’s subsidiary IDMC inaugurated India’s first Ready-to-Use Culture (RUC) manufacturing plant at Anand. Around 90 percent of the starter cultures used in Indian fermented dairy products had previously been imported; this plant marks India’s move toward self-reliance in an area that is fundamental to producing curd, cheese, butter, and other value-added dairy products. It is a concrete example of how NDDB continues to build technological sovereignty for the cooperative dairy sector, not just scale.

Where NDDB stands today 🔗

Six decades after its founding, NDDB’s footprint in India’s dairy economy is extensive. India’s dairy cooperative sector now includes 22 milk federations, 241 district unions, and serves 2.35 lakh villages, connecting 1.72 crore dairy farmers. Milk production has grown from a shortage-ridden 20 million tonnes in the 1960s to over 239 million tonnes in 2023-24. India contributes roughly 23 percent of global milk output, and the sector accounts for more than 4 percent of the national GDP.

Women remain a critical part of this story. Women comprise around 70 percent of the dairy workforce and 35 percent of cooperative members, with over 48,000 women-led cooperatives and 16 all-women Milk Producer Organisations now operating under NDDB Dairy Services. The cooperative model has, as the government itself has noted, broken barriers of gender, caste, religion, and community in ways that few rural development programmes have managed.

NDDB’s story is, at its core, a story about what happens when development is designed around the people it is meant to serve. By giving farmers ownership of the system – its assets, its decisions, its profits – the Board turned dairying from a livelihood of last resort into a dignified and economically viable enterprise for millions. The institutions it built, the technologies it transferred, and the cooperative ethos it embedded are still producing results today.

What do you think? India’s dairy cooperative model successfully transferred ownership and profit back to small-scale farmers – do you think this cooperative framework could be applied to other agricultural sectors in India or elsewhere to achieve similar outcomes? And as NDDB pushes into digital technology, genomics, and sustainability, do you think smaller and more marginalised cooperatives have equal access to these advancements, or does the gap between well-resourced and under-resourced cooperatives risk widening?

References

1. https://www.pib.gov.in/FeaturesDeatils.aspx?NoteId=151137
2. https://www.nddb.coop/about/genesis
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Dairy_Development_Board
4. https://www.fao.org/4/t3080t/t3080t07.htm
5. https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/top-50-projects-operation-flood-11751
6. https://www.nddb.coop/about/genesis/flood
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_revolution_(India)
8. https://www.sankalpindia.net/book/operation-flood-leading-white-revolution
9. https://www.nddb.coop/services/animalbreeding/project/ndp
10. https://byjus.com/free-ias-prep/national-dairy-development-board-nddb/
11. https://www.gktoday.in/national-dairy-development-board/
12. https://beta.nddb.coop/press-released/honble-union-minister-of-home-affairs-cooperation-inaugurates-nddbs-new-office-building-idmcs-ready-to-use-culture-plant-ncdfis-office-complex/
13. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2194086&reg=3&lang=2