Milkfed, the Punjab State Cooperative Milk Producers Federation, was set up in 1973 on the Amul model: village-level societies collecting milk twice a day, district unions processing it, and a state federation marketing it under the Verka brand.
It gave small dairy producers a guaranteed daily cash income, which in rural Punjab is the only regular income many households have between harvests.
Markfed, the agricultural marketing cooperative, is one of the largest such bodies in Asia and handles procurement, inputs and food processing.
The cooperative sector in Punjab also includes the primary agricultural credit societies, which are the main formal rural lender, and the cooperative sugar mills.
The cooperatives are simultaneously the most effective rural institution in Punjab and among the most politically captured, with board elections fought as party contests and appointments made accordingly.
The Anand pattern came to Punjab under Operation Flood with World Bank money, and the whole apparatus arrived ready made from Gujarat: the fat testing, the twice daily collection, the payment cycle and the union structure. Punjab did not invent any of it and took it up faster than most states did.
The regular payment is what makes it work. A household with two animals is paid against measured fat content on a fixed cycle, and that income is independent of the crop and of the mandi.
The cooperative sugar mills were built in the 1950s and 1960s and most have closed or run below capacity, held under by cane arrears and by their own losses. Where a mill has gone the cane has gone with it, which is why the gur trade survives in some districts and not in others.