How the three sectors hold together

The three sectors all play a part in turning natural raw materials into finished products we can use. To show how, the book takes you to Anand district in Gujarat.

In the early 1940s, farmers in Anand sold their milk in neighbouring villages, cycling or walking there under the scorching sun. Milk spoils or curdles very fast in hot weather, so they had to sell it quickly. It was a lot of effort for very little money.

So they depended on middlemen, people who buy goods from producers and sell them to consumers. The middlemen bought the milk in bulk at very low prices and sold it in the market for much more, keeping the difference. The farmers often felt cheated and harassed.

One day the farmers went together to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. He advised them to form a cooperative, to become independent and stop relying on middlemen. A cooperative is a group of people who voluntarily come together to meet their economic and social needs in a formal way; they own it, and decisions are taken by the members together.

AMUL (short for Anand Milk Union Limited) was set up in 1946, led by Tribhuvandas Patel (a lawyer and freedom fighter) and Dr Varghese Kurien (an engineer then working at a dairy factory in Mumbai). It brought farmers, including women, together and gave them control over producing and selling their milk. Everyone shared the work, their income slowly rose, they no longer needed middlemen, and they became like one big family!

So much milk was being collected that the farmers decided to make other products from it. They set up a factory in Anand and began making butter and milk powder. Today its products are made in plants all over India, sold in shops large and small, and exported to several countries.

Now place the sectors:

• Primary: the farmers milk their cows; milk comes directly from a natural source.
• Secondary: in factories, milk is processed from a liquid into other forms: milk powder, ghee, cheese, butter.
• Tertiary: lorries, trucks, railways, air and shipping transport the products, and shops sell them.

Other milk cooperatives include Nandini (Karnataka), Mother Dairy (Delhi), Aavin (Tamil Nadu), Vijaya (Andhra Pradesh), Kevi (Nagaland), Sudha (Bihar) and Verka (Punjab).

The book ends with the book in your hands: pulp, the wood fibre of a tree, becomes paper, and after printing, textbooks. None of it would be possible without all three sectors working together. And worth remembering: recycling just one tonne of paper saves 17 trees and 2.5 cubic metres of landfill space, and recycling paper takes 70 per cent less energy and water than making new paper from wood pulp.