Amul: You would have seen such videos on the news. Farmers dumping their tomatoes on the road. This was from Bihar. But this can be seen in every state. If you look up news headlines, you’ll see the same thing in Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh,
Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Haryana, and almost in every state, at least one such incident. Why do the farmers waste their tomatoes like this?
The reason is the frustration of the farmers. Friends, tomatoes are perishable. It cannot be stored for long, it’ll spoil. The problem is, most farmers do not have cold storage facilities. And when they go to sell their tomatoes in the market, They are blackmailed. They are quoted a non-negotiable price. They are offered around ₹2-₹3 per kg, sometimes even as little as ₹1 per kg. There have been cases where the farmers were offered only ₹0.25 per kg. This doesn’t happen to tomatoes only.
We see the same thing happening with onions, garlic, sugarcane, wheat, and corn. When the farmers get so little for their produce, they get frustrated and decide not to sell. It’s better to throw away the crops, to let them go to waste.
This isn’t a new problem. In 1945, the dairy farmers in Gujarat were suffering from the same problems. When they went to sell their milk in the market, the milk contractors quoted them a non-negotiable price, they could either take it or leave it. But there was a twist in our story when these dairy farmers decided to join together and fight against the problem together. They decided to start their organisation.It’d be “Of the Dairy Farmer, For the Dairy Farmer, By the Dairy Farmer”. An organisation whose turnover last year was ₹610 billion. This is the story of Amul.
