The Hindu Business Line : daCunha chief gets award for Amul butter campaign

The Vice-President, Mr Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, today conferred the "Dr Kurien Award" for 2001-02 on Mr Sylvester daCunha, creator of the `Utterly Butterly' moppet associated with the Amul brand since October 1966.

The 73-year-old Mr daCunha, who is the Chairman of daCunha Communications Pvt Ltd, was given the award at the 33rd Dairy Industry Conference here "in recognition of creating unique brand images for Indian dairy products as well as keeping alive the Amul butter campaign for four decades".

The Amul moppet has featured in hoardings for almost 38 years, making it the longest running ad campaign ever in the world. The hoardings displayed one-liners that constituted a veritable commentary on contemporary political and social events, with each week featuring a new theme.

Mr daCunha said that the person who created the round-eyed, chubby-cheeked Amul moppet, lurking around in each of the hoardings similar to R.K. Laxman's Common Man (who too did not have a name), was the ad firm's Art Director, Mr Eustace Fernandez.

"We bagged the Amul account in 1966. The fact that we really cherish about our association is that never once has our client interfered with our work. We never had to get the themes or the ads cleared by them, which was a measure of the professional trust they reposed on us," he added.

Earlier, in his inaugural address to the Conference, the Vice-President lauded the Indian model of dairy development, which, he said, had shown "how small farmers can join together and pool their strength to mount a big organised effort through adoption of new technologies as also techniques of modern management and international marketing".

Describing the dairy sector as the "farmers' best friend", Mr Shekhawat said that the supportive income from animal husbandry and dairying was the "farmer's cash insurance against any distress caused by crop failures".

Speaking on the occasion, the Chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (Amul), Dr Verghese Kurien, said that the secret behind the Rs 3,000 crore co-operative's success lay in its being owned by the dairy farmers of Gujarat. It is they who had elected its board and entrusting the management of its operations to professionals, who were accountable to the farmer-members.

The Chairman of the National Dairy Development Board, Dr Amrita Patel, said that country's milk production, currently about 88 million tonnes (mt), is expected to touch 130 mt by 2015. The challenge in the coming years would to be link rural producers to markets through professionally managed institutions.

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