Verghese Kurien, another of the ‘nation builders’, began working with the farmers in 1949, after returning to India from Michigan State University, where he earned a Master of Science of Mechanical Engineering. He organised a cooperative organization to help market milk directly to the consumers. After years of struggle, the cooperative began to produce dramatic results. In 1965 the NDDB was created replicate the program on a nationwide basis. For his instituition’s headquarters in Anand (Fig.10, 11), Kurien turned to Kanvinde who started this major complex in 1967. In 1974, a major production facility at Mehsana was constructed (Fig.12, 13). In both the places, with an efficient functional organisation, a major concern was to respond to the socio-cultural matrix of the users of the cooperative complex, who were poor farmers in a predominantly agrarian economy.

When replication of this cooperative dairy program began in 1970, total annual milk procurement was only 190,000 tons with 278,000 farmers involved in the program. By 1998, under Dr. Kurien's leadership, Operation Flood involved more than eight million dairy producers in 70,000 cooperatives, supplying almost three million tons of milk annually to over 800 cities and towns throughout that country. Reaching nearly 230 million people, Operation Flood is today the largest agricultural development program in the world and has made India world’s largest milk producer.

In addition to leading NDDB in its quest to improve world nutrition, Dr. Kurien played a key role in many other organizations. He is the chairman of the IRMA, which Kanvinde constructed from 1978 (Fig.14, 15). Currently a new phase in NDDB is being designed (Fig.16). With Kurien’s patronage, Kanvinde had a lifetime involvement with this industry demonstrating how architects of vision need visionary clients to realise their ideas.