GCMMF, the owner of Amul remembered its founder chairman Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel on Tuesday. He was born on 22 October 1903, in Anand, Gujarat.
Hailing him, GCMMF Managing Director R S Sodhi tweeted “Today we celebrated 116th Birth Anniversary of Amul’s founder Chairman Shri Tribhuvandas Patel, who founded Amul 73 years back which is today India’s biggest FMCG or Food organization with Annual turnover exceeding Rs 50000 cr ($7 billion).”
Patel was the founder of the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union in 1946, and later the Amul co-operative movement in Anand, Gujarat, India. He was a freedom fighter and a committed follower of Gandhi.
By the late 1940s, he started working with farmers in Kheda district, under the guidance of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and after setting up the Union, he hired a young manager named Verghese Kurien in 1950, who had since become synonymous with Amul, for his leadership of the co-operative movement.
Patel is known as the father of the cooperative movement in India.
Tribhuvandas Patel was awarded the 1963 the Ramon Magsaysay Award for ‘Community Leadership’, together with Dara Nusserwanji Khurody, and Verghese Kurien and the Padma Bhushan from the Govt. of India in 1964.
Under the selfless leadership of Tribhuvandas Patel, in August 1973, Amul celebrated its 25th Anniversary with Morarji Desai, Maniben Patel and Verghese Kurien.
When he voluntarily retired from the Chairmanship of AMUL, in the early 1970s, he was presented with a purse of six hundred thousand rupees, by the grateful members of the village cooperatives — one rupee per member being the contribution.
He used this fund to start a charitable trust, named the Tribhuvandas Foundation – an NGO to work on women and child health in Kheda district. He was the first Chairman of Tribhuvandas Foundation. He handed over the chairmanship to Verghese Kurien, when the organisation started to grow quickly, after receiving foreign grants.