9 - Political aspects of agricultural change

Summary

AGRARIAN ISSUES IN INDIAN POLITICS

The year 1966 was a major turning point in the history of Indian agricultural development policy. In that year, three significant sets of events occurred that profoundly affected the determination of Government of India policy makers to intensify measures to increase agricultural production as rapidly as possible in order to make India self-sufficient in foodgrains. The first was the great drought/famine of 1966-67 in north India, which followed upon a previous bad year for Indian agriculture and which occurred simultaneously with scarcity conditions in other areas of the country. The second was the initial harvesting of the new HYVs of wheat brought to India in the winter of 1965-66 by Norman Borlaug and his associates and planted in several locations in north India and elsewhere during the rabi (winter) season of 1966. The third was a combination of domestic and international factors affecting U.S. government foreign policy making, including the Vietnam war, U.S. balance of payments problems, and the potential use of U.S. food exports for hard currency payments to alleviate those problems.

Although these three sets of events constituted a turning point, the solutions adopted to deal with the crisis events of 1966-67, namely, the drought and shifts in U.S. attitudes toward India, were entirely consistent with previous Indian government policies for economic development, agricultural development, and agrarian reform. Those policies, which focused on the rapid adoption of the HYVs and the associated technology, ignored the long-standing issues of agrarian reform and were designed to be acceptable to the dominant political and economic elites in the provincial capitals and in the Indian countryside. They fed into and reinforced historic regional and social imbalances in economic development in India. They ignored the problems of the small cultivators in vast regions of the country, most notably in the great rainfed paddy-growing areas of India stretching from eastern U. P. to Bengal and including as well large parts of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Assam. They also failed to solve, only postponed facing the hard solutions to, the basic production problems of Indian agriculture in those areas of the country that comprise the bulk of its territory and population and that depend upon the monsoon or lack either adequate irrigation or dependable rainfall.