Amul to sponsor Afghan team for ICC World Cup

TNN

Vadodara: Exactly 50 years after Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as ‘Frontier Gandhi’ visited Amul in milk city Anand, the home grown dairy giant which has flourished from Mahatma Gandhi’s Gujarat will strengthen its tie with Afghanistan.

The dairy brand will be the official sponsor of the Afghanistan cricket team for the ICC World Cup 2019. It will be Afghanistan’s first ICC World Cup as an international cricket council (ICC) full member. Afghanistan’s cricket team is currently placed 10th on the ICC one day international rankings.

The Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) which markets brand Amul has been collaborating with multiple sports events to connect with the youth to promote consumption of milk and make consumption of dairy products fashionable.

“World Cup is a good opportunity to connect with the youth. At the same time, we have a very old association with Afghanistan whose team is rated as the fastest growing cricket team in the world,” said R S Sodhi, managing director of GCMMF.

The best part of this World Cup format is that all 10 teams will play one another, which means that Afghanistan will play nine matches, including one against India. “We will get huge visibility for brand Amul all across,” said a GCMMF official. Afghanistan will start its campaign against Australia on June 1.

Amul has been exporting dairy products to Afghanistan for 20 years now. “We have developed a good market there with over 3,000 metric tonnes of Amul skimmed milk powder and Amulspray infant milk food exported last year,” said Sodhi.

Amul has also played host to many groups of Afghan women who have been visiting Anand to study and replicate Amul model of dairy development. The last such batch visited milk city in 2017.