India After Independence: 1947-2000 (66 page)

The Kaira Cooperative success made the movement’s spread to the rest of the country inevitable. In 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then prime minister of India, wrote to the chief ministers of all the states about the proposed large programme to set up cooperative dairies on the ‘Anand Pattern’. To perform this task the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) was created in 1965 at his initiative. Kurien with his proven
dynamism was to be at its helm as its honorary chairman, proudly continuing to draw his salary as an employee of the Kaira milk producers. At his insistence NDDB was located in Anand and not in New Delhi and acquired a structure not of yet another inefficient government department but one which was more suitable to its objectives. Drawing heavily from the Kaira Union for personnel, expertise and much more, the NDDB launched ‘Operation Flood’, a programme to replicate the Anand Pattern in other milksheds of the country. By 1995 there were 69,875 village dairy cooperatives spread over 170 milksheds all over the country with a total membership of 8.9 million farmers. Though the expansion was impressive, yet, by one estimate, Operation Flood represented only 6.3 per cent of total milk production and 22 per cent of marketed milk in India. The potential for further expansion thus remains immense.

A study done by the World Bank (evaluation department) of Operation Flood
¹⁰
details how the effort to replicate the ‘Anand Pattern’ paid rich dividends. A brief summary of the findings of this study show how the complex multi-pronged benefits, similar to those achieved in Gujarat, were now spread to other parts of the country.

First, the obvious impact of Operation Flood was the considerable increase in milk supply and consequent increase in income of the milk producers, particularly the poor. While national milk production grew at 0.7 per cent per annum till 1969, it grew at more than 4 per cent annually since the inception of Operation Flood. ‘In constant (1995) Rs., the annual payment by the cooperative system (to) dairy farmers has risen from Rs. 2.1 billion in 1972 to Rs. 34 billion in 1995.’
¹¹
Further, village level enquiries showed that dairying was increasingly becoming an important activity of the farmer and in some cases becoming the main source of income, particularly among the poor. It was estimated that ‘
60 per cent of the beneficiaries were marginal or small farmers and landless
,’ and it was further stated that ‘the extent to which such benefits (were) reaching the extremely poor and needy (destitute, widows, landless, and near landless) in certain “spearhead” villages (was) unusually noteworthy.’
¹²
Milk cooperatives thus proved to be a significant anti-poverty measure.

In this connection, the World Bank report highlighted an important ‘lesson’ learnt from Operation Flood, a lesson with major politico-economic implications. The ‘lesson’ was that ‘by focusing a project on a predominant activity of the poor, “
self-selection
” is likely to result in a major portion of the beneficiaries being poor’ thus reaching ‘target’ groups which generally prove ‘elusive to reach in practice.’
¹³
Further, it may be added the Anand type milk cooperatives reached the poor irrespective of caste, religion or gender, without targeting any of these groups specifically. Similar objectives were met by the Employment Guarantee Scheme first launched in rural Maharashtra in the mid-seventies, followed by a few other states including Andhra Pradesh. The chief beneficiaries of this scheme were the landless who were predominantly from among the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, i.e., they got ‘self-selected’, though the scheme did not exclusively target these groups. Such programmes
had the important advantage of reaching certain deprived sections without exclusively targeting them. This prevented an almost inevitable opposition or even a backlash among the groups excluded, which has so often been witnessed in schemes in India as well as in other countries, such as the US, where benefits were sought to be given exclusively to a particular community or group.

Second, as in the case of Anand, the impact of the milk cooperatives and Operation Flood went way beyond just increase in milk supply and incomes. As the World Bank study reported, ‘A by-product impact of Operation Flood and the accompanying dairy expansion has been the establishment of an indigenous dairy equipment manufacturing industry (only 7 per cent of dairy equipment is now imported) and an impressive body of indigenous expertise that includes animal nutrition, animal health, artificial insemination (AI), management information systems (MIS), dairy engineering, food technology and the like.’ The indigenization of the infrastructure and technology and the training of rural labour for performing a wide range of technical functions is said to have considerably lowered costs, making it possible to procure and account for minute quantities of milk brought in by the producers, without raising costs to an unviable level.

Third, Operation Flood spread and even intensified the impact of the milk cooperatives on women and children and on education. Realizing the potential of empowering women through this movement, Operation Flood in cooperation with NGOs like SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) established about 6,000 women dairy cooperative societies (WDCS) where only women were members and the management committees also were constituted exclusively of women. These cooperatives were seen to be generally more efficiently run than the male-dominated cooperatives. They gave women a greater control over their lives through the milk income accruing to them and also enabled them to participate in decision-making outside their homes, giving full play to their managerial and leadership potential. Further, field level observation showed that the milk income in the poorer villages often made it possible for children to attend school, while in better-off villages it contributed to children staying in school longer, that is, it reduced the dropout rate. In still wealthier villages, where all children went to school, a part of the earning of the cooperative was used to improve the facilities in the local school. The field surveys also confirmed that increased school attendance for girls was perceived as a very common effect of the dairy cooperative societies. Greater family income and the woman involved in dairying being able to stay at home instead of going out for wage labour relieved children from having to earn a wage or look after household chores. Instead, they attended school.

The spread of the ‘Anand Pattern’ was not to be limited to milk. Cooperatives for fruits and vegetable producers, oilseeds cultivators, small-scale salt makers and tree growers were started at the initiative of the NDDB. Again the Kaira Union provided the technology as well as the
trained personnel to help this process. Often the resistance from vested interests, particularly the powerful oilseeds traders, was vicious. In some regions of the country, the NDDB team which tried to make the initial moves towards setting up cooperatives was threatened with physical violence and there were cases where workers died in ‘mysterious’ circumstances. Yet, the movement has progressed. In many parts of the country cooperative outlets of fruits and vegetables are beginning to be as common as milk outlets. The ‘Dhara’ brand of vegetable oils, a child of the NDDB effort, is beginning to represent in the area of vegetable oils what ‘Amul does in the area of milk and milk products.

This has been one of the major achievements of post-independence India. The search for cooperatives led to Indian delegations going to China in the mid-fifties; today scores of countries send delegations to India to study and learn from the Anand experience. An indication of the impact this experiment had at the grassroots level was the statement made to the present authors by a poor farmer in a village near Anand in 1985, ‘Gujarat is fortunate to have one Kurien; if only God would give one Kurien to every state, many of India’s problems would be solved.’

This poor Gujarat peasant who in his personalized way was trying to explain to us the magnitude of the success of this experiment with reference to Kurien, a Syrian Christian from Kerala, will surely feel out of tune with the Hindu communal upsurge his state witnessed in early 1999, where Christians were hounded and attacked, their religion presumably making them anti-national!

India witnessed the unique phenomenon of wide-ranging land reforms being implemented within a modern democratic structure without any violence or use of authoritarian force. There was no forced collectivization as in the Soviet Union or forcible expropriation of land and pushing of peasants into communes as in China, processes that had cost millions of lives. Nor was there any external army of occupation undertaking the task of land reforms among a defeated people as in Japan. India had to attempt this task with adult franchise, full civil liberties to the Opposition and an independent judiciary. Yet, basing itself on the heritage of long, powerful national and peasant movements, independent India successfully transformed the colonial agricultural structure (with all its semi-feudal characteristics) which it had inherited. The legacy of nearly half a century of agrarian stagnation was reversed. Institutional and infrastructural changes were put in place, which were to enable the bringing in of modern, progressive or ‘capitalist’ farming in more and more parts of the country with the ushering in of the next phase, that of technological reforms associated with the Green Revolution.

Large, semi-feudal, rapacious landlords rack-renting the peasantry as well as extracting illegal cesses in cash, kind or labour (begar) had by and
large become a thing of the past. State demand from the peasant, the other major burden on the agriculturist, also gradually virtually disappeared. Many states scrapped land revenue. Elsewhere the real value of land revenue fell sharply as agricultural prices rose steeply while the land revenue rates remained constant for decades. While in the colonial period the burden of land revenue was very high, often adding up to half the net income from agriculture, it gradually declined to negligible levels, below one per cent of the net income from agriculture. The stranglehold of the moneylender over the peasantry was also considerably weakened with the growing availability of cooperative and institutional credit. Loans advanced by such institutions increased from Rs. 0.23 billion in 1950-51 to 3.65 billion in 1965-66 and 7.75 billion in 1972-73. This credit was becoming increasingly available to the poorer sections. Gradually, but surely, democracy, the poorest having an equal vote, kept the pressure on the government as well as the rural elite (for their political survival) to try and reach benefits to the lower sections of the peasantry. The resources available to the peasantry as a whole for agricultural improvement thus increased significantly.

The motivation or incentive for agricultural improvement was now present among a much wider section of the agrarian classes. Large numbers of zamindars and jagirdars who were formerly absentee landlords now took to modern capitalist farming in the lands that they could retain for personal cultivation. Similarly, the tenants and sharecroppers who either got ownership rights or security of tenure were now prepared to make far greater investment and improvements in their lands. The landless, who received ceiling-surplus or bhoodan lands or previously unoccupied government land distributed in anti-poverty programmes, were ready to put in their best into lands which they could now, typically for the first time, call their own. As discussed above (see
chapter 28
), the cumulative effect of the various land reform measures in creating progressive cultivators, making investments and improvements in productivity was considerable, on a national scale.

Further, the state, instead of extracting surplus from agriculture, as in the colonial period, now made major efforts at agricultural improvement. Community Development projects were started in rural areas and Block Development Officers (BDOs), Agricultural Extension Officers and Village Level Workers (VLWs) became a routine feature in hundreds of thousands Indian villages, trying to inculcate improved farming methods, supply seeds and implements, promote small-scale public works and so on. Major investments were made in scientific agricultural research, irrigation projects, electricity generation, and general infrastructure (see
chapter 25
). Availability of chemical fertilizers increased from 73 thousand tonnes of nutrient in 1950-1 to 784 thousand tonnes in 1965-6 and 2769 thousand tonnes in 1972-3. All this had a major impact on agriculture. As Daniel Thorner, one of the keenest observers of Indian agriculture since independence noted:
¹⁵

It is sometimes said that the (initial) five-year plans neglected agriculture. This charge cannot be taken seriously. The facts are that in India’s first twenty-one years of independence more has been done to foster change in agriculture and more change has actually taken place than in the preceding two hundred years.

The results speak for themselves. During the first three Plans (leaving out 1965-66, the last year of the Third Plan) Indian agriculture grew at an annual rate of over 3 per cent. This was a growth rate 7.5 times higher than that achieved during the last half century or so of the colonial period—the rate of growth between 1891 and 1946 being estimated as only 0.4 per cent per year. Further, the growth rate achieved during the first three Plans was a function not only of extension of area but also of increases in yields per acre, nearly half the agricultural growth was explained by the latter (see
chapter 31
). Also, the agricultural growth achieved in this period was higher than what was achieved by many other countries in a comparable situation. For example, Japan achieved a growth rate of less than 2.5 per cent between 1878 and 1912 and an even lower growth rate after this till 1937.

It is generally agreed that as a result of land reform in India, self-cultivation became the predominant form of cultivation in most parts of the country. Moreover, over time, the vast mass of owner cultivators were small and medium farmers. By one estimate, by 1976-77, nearly 97 per cent of the cultivators had operational holdings of less than 25 acres and they operated 73.6 per cent of the total area. (86.9 per cent of the cultivators had operational holdings of 10 acres or less and they operated 43.4 per cent of the total area.) On the other hand, along with this vast mass there were the large landowners operating above 25 acres, though they constituted only 3 per cent of the holdings and 26.2 per cent of the operated area. Further, the share of the large landowners, both in the proportion of holdings and area controlled, kept declining steadily over time.
¹⁶
Very large estates of over a hundred acres were very few and rare, and they were generally run on modern capitalist lines. The picture that emerged was remarkably similar to what Ranade had envisaged several decades earlier.