In 1964 Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri visited Anand, in Gujarat, where farmers owned the Amul dairy cooperative. He spent a night in a village in Kaira district as a farmer’s guest. Afterward he wrote to the Chief Ministers: “We envisage a large programme of co-operative dairies during the Fourth Plan.”
In 1965 the government created the National Dairy Development Board. Shastri asked Verghese Kurien of Amul to lead it. Kurien later recalled that Shastri wanted to “transplant the spirit of Anand in many other places.”