Threading the needle

Vikas Sinha

Many villagers in Uttarakhand earlier considered Chir pine as a menace but no more now.

How did you come up with such an innovative idea of getting revenues out of fire?

Pine needle is the major cause of forest fire. If we can somehow clear the pine needle, we will be highly successful in curbing the forest fires and this can only be done if this pine needle is linked to livelihood resources of villagers. Forest department sought expertise of IIFM (Indian institute of Forest Management) and FRI (Forest Research Institute), towards devising a long term planning to curtail the raging forest fires in the state. And finally they came up with a wonderful solution. Now we are planning to produce oil out of it and our forest would be safer as well.
So, should we be assured that these forests are safe from pine needle menace?

Yes of course. As soon as we complete the solicitation with these organizations, they will start their operations. They will use these highly inflammable pine needles for making oil. Besides the safety of these forests, they will be also generating tremendous employment opportunities for people around here.
What is the use of pine needle oil?

Pine needle is a great cure for a number of orthopedic problems like arthritis, muscle rupture etc. Besides that, pine Needle is an energy booster and anti-ageing herb. If used consistently, the human body may experience benefits by taking pine Needle oil. These include reversing the aging process, maintaining good health, physical strength, and vitality. It has protein, Vitamin A, Carotene and Iron, which are all required by the human body to function properly. Rutin, found in Pine Needles, is thought to be the compound that cleans blood vessels.

Umesh Joshi, an ayurvedic physician based at Ranikhet, has treated uncountable patients of joint pains and arthritis through pine needle oil. He says,"Pine needle is blessed with magical powers of healing arthritis and several other orthopaedic problems. It is a perfect pain killer."
"I am a patient of arthritis for more than three years. Initially, I was undergoing allopathic treatment but it was very expensive and I hardly found any relief. Then a friend of mine suggested me about pine needle oil and I am in a much better condition now. Recently I heard that it will be produced at a large scale in our state and will be readily available. Now I don't have to travel to Ranikhet always to buy my medicine," said Mahendra Rawat, a resident of Almorah.
Pine needles have been a major cause behind hundreds of forest fires in the state. Chir Pine's leaf parts are like needles and are highly rich in resins. It falls off during autumn and spreads across the floor of the forest during autumn and is primary cause behind flaring up of fires during summers. Uttarakhand forest department has been in efforts of finding a solution to this problem for a long time. Finally they have succeeded not only in getting rid of this highly inflammable object, but also generating revenue out of it.
While 204 cases of forest fires have taken place in the past one year encompassing a total of 2792 hectares of forest area, there have been constant efforts done by forest department to check the spread of fire. Clearing pine needles was of major concern as it is spread almost everywhere and was hardly of any use.
So finally these pine needles have been proven to be of great constructive use. There is a very thin scope of industrialisation in valleys as most of the industrial affairs come at the cost of environment degradation, but production of pine needle oil will bring industrialization with an incentive of forest preservation. Generation of employment opportunities at a massive scale is also being awaited by the people in the state.

Amul, the taste of success

RK Mishra/Ahmedabad

Amul's mission was the development of farmers, nutrition to the nation and, heart in heart, the real development of India, says Varghese Kurien
What started as a small cooperative movement over six decades ago in a mid-sized town in the western state of Gujarat has now become an icon of rural empowerment, fashioning in the process what is called the white revolution to catapult India as the world's largest producer of milk.In 1946 a bright youth was sent to study dairy engineering at the Michigan State University on government scholarship but he came back with a masters in metallurgy and nuclear physics instead.
Even so, nothing could change what destiny had in store for Dr. Verghese Kurien - whose efforts towards the white revolution earned him the World Food Prize and the Magsaysay Award, apart from numerous other recognitions within and outside India.
A Syrian Christian born in southern Kerala, Kurien moved to the dusty town of Anand to set up a milk cooperative and his achievement made people revere him as the milkman of India.
The best testimony to his work, perhaps, is the varied range of products that now line shelves in shops all over India and abroad - going way beyond just milk to pasteurised butter, cheese, ice creams, chocolates, clarified butter, sweets and other products, including probiotic milk and sugar-free ice cream.
So much so that this brand name, along with its iconic mascot - a cute little girl in polka-dot skirt and catchy slogans -has even overtaken its parent, the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, in terms of both name and fame.
"Amul is the brand name of over two million farmers, members of 10,000 village dairy cooperative societies throughout Gujarat. This is the heart of Amul," said Kurien, who has since retired.
"This is what gives strength to Amul, and this is what is so special about the Amul saga."
Drawn from the Sanskrit word "amulya", or priceless, the Amul journey began in the tumultuous days before India's independence when the dairy cooperative was set up under the directions of Vallabhbhai Patel, then Congress leader who went on to become India's first home minister.
Two years later, Kurien returned from the US and in 1949 left his government job to help the newly-formed cooperative, Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union.
This led to the birth of Amul - the rest, as is often said, is history.
In 1966, Amul procured just 1,000 litres of milk a day, but today this has gone up to as much as 8.4 million litres. The $1.5 billion cooperative has 13,328 village societies as members, covering 2.79 million milk producers.
In the current financial year, the cooperative is expected to have crossed a turnover of $1.8 billion and expects to log $2.2 billion by the next fiscal.
"Amul is the symbol of the achievements of dairy cooperatives over the last 65 years," said B.M. Vyas, managing director of the cooperative.
"Simply put, Amul symbolises the genesis of a vast cooperative, the triumph of indigenous technology, the marketing savvy of a farmers' organisation, a proven model of dairy development, high quality products at reasonable prices - to sum it all up, a confident nation on the move."
According to Amul chairperson Ramsinh Parmar, the first effort to organise dairy cooperatives had actually started after the enactment of the Cooperative Societies Act, 1912.
"But it was in the 1940s that farmers of Kaira district organised themselves into a dairy cooperative and decided to process and sell milk directly after collecting it from its own members," Parmar said.
Statistics show that though steps to improve the quality of milch cattle began in the 1st Five Year Plan (1951 to 1956), the absence of a stable and remunerative market for milk saw production stagnate.
Between 1951 and 1970, milk production grew by barely one percent annually while in fact per capita availability declined by an equivalent amount.
Then came "Operation Flood".
"It was Operation Flood, implemented for the National Dairy Development Board from 1970 to 1996 by founder-chairman Dr. Kurien, who had an uninterrupted spell of 33 years, that radically transformed dairy development in India," said his close aide P.A. Joseph.
This programme ensured milk producers' cooperatives get well entrenched in villages and made modern technology available to them. It also increased milk production and augmented rural incomes, which went to the milk producer and not the middlemen.
More importantly, the programme empowered small rural producers, providing them with employment opportunities at their homes with steady returns.
Marginal landholdings make up 57 percent of rural households in India and thanks to such cooperatives dairying is a viable option even for the landless. Nearly 70 million Indian households hold a total of 98 million cows and buffaloes.
A majority of milk producers have one or two milch animals and these small producers account for some 70 percent of the milk production. On an average, 22.5 percent of the income of rural households is contributed by milk.
"Operation Flood essentially replicated the Anand pattern countrywide, joining village-level cooperatives to form district-level unions, which in turn joined in state-level marketing federations," said Joseph.
"The primary milk producer thus governs this entire federal cooperative structure."
The dairy major has also emerged as a role model of sorts, which many developing nations want to emulate. Earlier this year, Ethopian Ambassador to India Gennet Zewide visited Amul and expressed a desire to replicate the white revolution using the same model in their country.
The cooperative dairy movement is impacting lives in many other ways as well.
The Banas dairy, for example, a member of the Amul cooperative, started a unique initiative called the Internet Sewa Project in Banaskantha district in Gujarat.
This is a village-level effort at bridging the digital divide by providing information kiosks at the village cooperative level. Official forms, educational applications and local market prices are provided at the information kiosk so that people do not have to travel all the way to the district headquarters for this information.
From Banaskantha to IT capital Bangalore, Amul has branded itself on the lives of every Indian. Begin your day with Amul milk and pasteurised butter on toast. Lunch on Amul curd, have a snack with Amul cheeses and round off the day with some Amul chocolate.
It's all about Amul, and also about India.
As Kurien puts it: "Amul's mission was the development of farmers, nutrition to the nation and, heart in heart, the real development of India."