Kurien was a metallurgical engineer who ended up in Anand, Gujarat, on a government posting he didn't want. He planned to leave. Instead he stayed for the rest of his life helping a small dairy cooperative take on the private middlemen.
The idea was simple: farmers own the cooperative, so they keep most of the money. He made it work at a huge scale, and with his team figured out how to make milk powder from buffalo milk, which experts had said couldn't be done.
Operation Flood copied the Amul model across the country. Millions of small farmers, many of them women with one or two animals, got a steady income from it. He reportedly didn't drink milk himself.