In 1970, the National Dairy Development Board of India launched
Operation Flood (OF), which would become the one of biggest dairy
development programmes in the world. By the late 1990s, India
overtook the United States to become the world's largest milk
producer. Operation Flood intended to make Indian dairy farmers
self-sufficient. It did this through facilitating the setting up of
cooperative federations in different parts of the country, where
the ownership of the production line of milk and milk products lay
with the farmers themselves. Along the way, the "white
revolution", as the movement was also known, spawned iconic
brands associated with cooperative federations from different parts
of the country, such as Amul, Mother Dairy and Nandini. One of
these brands – Nandini – with its primary market
presence in the state of Karnataka, and in the south generally, was
the subject of a complex trademark infringement suit recently
decided by the Supreme Court (see).
