The story
Founded by Verghese Kurien in 1965.1
The NDDB was founded by Dr. Verghese Kurien in 1965. The prime minister of India at that time, Lal Bahadur Shastri, wished to replicate the success of the Kaira Cooperative Milk Producers' Union (Amul) across India. Kurien had been instrumental in Amul's success, where he had instituted a producer-run, democratic farmers' cooperative model. Until this time, India's own dairy industry was limited in its capacity and dominated by traders who set pricing. Marginal milk producers reaped little reward in this system, and the country's foreign exchange was expended in European and New Zealand dairy industries, purchasing dairy imports to fill the shortfall.
Between the start of the NDDB's landmark project in 1970, Operation Flood and its founder's retirement in 1998, India quadrupled its milk production, with the board's technical and organisational support. By then India had 81,000 dairy cooperatives, formed with the assistance of NDDB on their "Amul" pattern. In 1998, India became the largest milk producer in the world, when its output surpassed that of the United States. The country remains a major dairy-producing nation.
From Wikipedia’s article on National Dairy Development Board, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4