The GCMMF plant on the edge of Anand is the original Amul dairy, and it remains a working facility processing millions of litres of milk every day. Guided tours are offered free of charge, typically at 9am and 3pm on weekdays — turn up at the main gate a few minutes early and you will usually be absorbed into a group. The tour walks you through the pasteurisation halls, the butter and cheese production lines, and the cold storage rooms, explaining how the cooperative collects milk from hundreds of village societies each morning and transforms it into the familiar Amul products within hours.
The scale is remarkable for what began as a farmer protest movement. The cooperative now links over three million dairy farmers across Gujarat, and the branded products — butter, cheese, ice cream, milk powder — reach every corner of India and well beyond. What makes the tour worth doing is not the machinery itself but the human story behind it: the photographs in the entrance hall show the early days, the simple equipment the founding farmers used, and the faces of the people who built this from almost nothing. If you have read anything about the White Revolution or the cooperative model in development economics, standing in the original plant gives that story a satisfying solidity.