10 Quotes by Verghese Kurien

I realised, in all humility, that chosing to lead one kind of life means putting aside the desire to pursue other option.

In India, all along, development as a process was always affected from the top down style of functioning. Naturally, because along with our freedom we had inherited a bureaucracy, which was designed by the British to rule, not to serve. The British way of doing things had always been to get things done through a government department and after independence we Indians merely continued this system.

a person who does not have respect for time, and does not have a sense of timing, can achieve little.

Any sensible government must learn to unleash the energy of its people and get them to perform instead of trying to get a bureaucracy to perform.

Long hours of working barefoot in the pans saturates their legs so much with salt that these farmers cannot even have a satisfactory cremation after death because their lower limbs do not burn. It is a miserable existence.

We Indians are an extremely intelligent people but we can progress as a nation only when we learn the secret of unleashing this positive power of the people. Whenever this happens it disturbs a lot of people - because they know that a giant is waking up.

I am one of those who firmly believe that our cities thrive at the expense of our villages; that our industries exploit agriculture.

If the situation demanded autocracy, I gave it autocracy.

This is the reason I have always had little patience with bureaucrats. Time and again they have revealed to me that they exist for their own power and pelf; they do not exist for the good of the country. In my rare moments of extreme despair I actually wonder why Kosygin’s advice to me should not be heeded – that some changes can be brought about only by revolution and by beheading some people! This.