Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel (22 October 1903 - 3 June 1994) was an Indian independence activist, lawyer, and politician.[1] A follower of Mahatma Gandhi,[1] he is regarded as the father of the cooperative movement in India,[1] most notably in the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union in 1946, and the Anand Co-operative movement.
Under the leadership of Tribhuvandas Patel, in August 1973, Amul celebrated its 25th anniversary with Morarji Desai, Maniben Patel and Verghese Kurien.[1] When he voluntarily retired from the Chairmanship of AMUL, in the early 1970s, he was presented with a purse of six hundred thousand rupees, by the grateful members of the village cooperatives — one rupee per member being the contribution.[1] He used this fund to start a charitable trust and NGO, named the Tribhuvandas Foundation, to work on women and child health in the Kheda district of Gujarat.[1] He was the first Chairman of Tribhuvandas Foundation.[1] He handed over the chairmanship to Verghese Kurien, when the organization started to grow quickly, after receiving funds from foreign grant[1] s.
The former chairperson of the National Dairy Development Board, Amrita Patel remarked in her opening address at an event at the Institute of Rural Management Anand about the Tribhuvandas Foundation saying "[Tribhuvandas Foundation] works in over 600 villages in the state of Gujarat in the field of maternal and infant care. What is unique about the programme of the Foundation is that it rides on the back of milk. It is the village milk co-operative that appoints a village health worker and pays an honorarium to the village health worker to undertake the work. So it is milk paying for health."[6]
Patel was active until his death, working to set up cooperative organizations for farming commodities such as oil. In the days before his death on June 3, 1994, thousands of farmers from all over Kaira visited him, assuring him that the movement started in 1946 would be continued. In these last days, he frequently asked about Kurien who, despite the urgency conveyed to him, never visited him before his death. More incidents and details about Patel's life have not been reported in English, partly due to the lack of translation from the native Gujarati language.[1]
On finding out about the financial struggle and shelving faced by the production of a film on his mentor Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel titled Sardar, Patel made the financial contributions necessary to have the film completed and released. It is not known if he watched the film.[citation needed]
He was married to Shrimati Mani Laxmi, and had one daughter and six sons. He had several grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.