National Dairy Development Board (NDDB)

The institution that drove India's White Revolution, with a small on-campus museum

Address PO Box 40, Anand, Gujarat 388 001

The NDDB campus sits on the outskirts of Anand and is the institutional headquarters of India's White Revolution — the national programme that replicated the Amul cooperative model across hundreds of districts and transformed India from a milk-deficient country into the world's largest dairy producer. The campus itself is a pleasant, well-maintained complex with the slightly purposeful feel of somewhere that has always taken its work seriously.

A small museum on campus documents the history of Operation Flood, the three-phase programme launched in 1970 that connected village dairy cooperatives to urban markets across India. The exhibits include photographs, maps of the expanding cooperative network, and material on Dr Verghese Kurien, who served as chairman of the NDDB from its founding in 1965 until 1998 and is the person most responsible for what Indian dairy became. The museum is modest — this is not a polished tourist attraction — but for anyone interested in development economics, cooperative movements, or the history of Indian agriculture, it is genuinely illuminating. Check in advance about access, as the campus is still a working institution and visitor hours can vary.

things to do sight
A story
When Dr Verghese Kurien presented Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri with the idea of replicating the Anand cooperative model across all of India, Shastri reportedly flew to Anand to see it for himself, drank a glass of cooperative milk, and approved the project on the spot. The National Dairy Development Board was created in 1965, and Kurien ran it for the next thirty years. By the time he was done, India had gone from chronic milk shortages to the world's largest dairy producer — a transformation he called Operation Flood, and the press called the White Revolution.