India After Independence: 1947-2000 (67 page)

However, the problem of the landless (India, unlike most other countries, had through the caste system inherited a large category of landless since ancient times) or the near landless, constituting nearly half the agricultural population has persisted. The high rate of population growth and the inability of the industrialization process to absorb a greater proportion of the agricultural population has made it difficult to deal with this situation. Providing agricultural land to all the landless is not, and perhaps never was, a politically or economically viable solution in Indian conditions. (After all, even West Bengal with a Communist government, for decades has never taken up seriously the question of land to the tiller, the major ‘success’ there being limited to getting security of tenure for about half the sharecroppers or bargadars.) Efforts at improving the
working conditions of the landless and providing them with non-farm employment in rural areas have had uneven results in various states and have left much to be desired in large parts of the country.

The effort at cooperative joint farming failed as one way of solving the problems of rural poverty, inequity and landlessness. Other efforts aimed at the underprivileged in the countryside were often appropriated by the relatively better off. Despite Nehru, despite the Avadi session (1955) adoption of ‘Socialistic Pattern of Society’ as the objective of the Congress (and its inclusion in the Directive Principles of the Constitution of India), despite the Nagpur congress recommendations, Indian agriculture did not move in the direction of socialism. Again, as Daniel Thorner put it very succinctly, ‘To the extent that the Government of India ever intended to—(introduce) socialism in the countryside, we may say that it has been no more successful in that direction than was the British regime in introducing capitalism.’
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Perhaps, it is possible now with more information available on the fate of the disastrous Soviet and Chinese attempts to introduce socialism in agriculture to ask whether this was not a lucky ‘failure’ ensured by the democratic nature of the Indian political system. Yet, independent India did succeed in essentially rooting out feudal elements from Indian agriculture and put the colonial agrarian structure that it inherited on the path of progressive, owner-cultivator based capitalist agricultural development; a development the benefits of which trickled down to the poorer sections of the peasantry and to some extent even to the agricultural labourers.

The considerable progress made in the early years was however inadequate for the growing needs of the country. The rapid rise of population at about 2.25 per cent per annum after independence, the rise in per capita income, the attempt at rapid industrialization in a hot house manner, two major wars with neighbours, all put demands on Indian agriculture difficult to meet. Import of foodgrains kept rising, from 12 million tons during the First Plan to 19.4 and 32.2 million tons during the Second and Third Plan respectively. On the basis of the institutional reforms already completed and the major infrastructural investments made the country was by the mid-sixties poised for the next phase of agrarian breakthrough, the Green Revolution, based on technological reforms.

In popular parlance, the phenomenon of the Green Revolution is identified with India’s being catapulted from a chronically food short country, with a begging-bowl image, to one which was self-sufficient and which became over time even surplus in food. The change follows the major technological reforms that occurred in Indian agriculture, particularly since the mid-sixties. There has been much debate on the timing and the political and economic factors behind the ushering in of the New Agricultural Strategy which led to the Green Revolution. Its impact on the nature of agricultural growth, on the changing position of various agrarian classes, particularly the poor, and on the class balance of governments has also generated lively controversy. The brief overall description of this phenomenon, given here is inevitably laced with elements of this controversy.

The view that in the ‘Nehru years’, i.e., from independence till his death in 1964, Indian agriculture was neglected or that the focus was only on institutional reforms and not on the technological base for agriculture has increasingly been abandoned. Nehru was well aware of the centrality of agricultural development in meeting his dream of rapid industrialization. The plan outlays on agriculture since the First Plan itself were substantial by any standards. Apart from the First Plan, where the outlay on agriculture and irrigation was 31 per cent of the total, in all the Plans that followed, the outlay was between 20 to 24 per cent, irrespective of the changes in regimes. It is true, that in the initial years, during the first two Plans, the expectations of output increases on the basis of institutional reforms, particularly when accompanied by cooperative farming, were quite high and proved to be misjudgements. However, simultaneously, with the efforts at institutional reforms, Nehru from the very beginning placed great emphasis on creating the physical and scientific infrastructure necessary for modern agriculture. Massive irrigation and power projects like the Bhakra-Nangal, numerous agricultural universities and research laboratories, fertilizer plants, etc., took their due place along with steel plants as the ‘temples of modern India’ in the Nehruvian vision.

Over time, by the late fifties and early sixties, as the benefits from the land reforms that could be carried out in Indian conditions had begun
to peak and the possibilities of agricultural growth based on extension of agriculture, i.e., bringing more area into cultivation, were also reaching their limit, Nehru’s focus inevitably shifted further towards technological solutions. (After all, countries like Japan and China which had carried out more far-reaching land reforms also had to follow the path of making modern technological improvements in agriculture to keep up their growth rates.) Even the New Agricultural Strategy of picking out select areas with certain natural advantages for intensive development with a package programme (the IADP or the Intensive Agricultural Districts Programme) was launched in fifteen districts, one for each state, on an experimental basis during the Third Plan in Nehru’s lifetime—a practice which was to be generalized on a large scale a few years later. As one of the major scholars of the Green Revolution, G.S. Bhalla, says:
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The qualitative technological transformation in India—the Green Revolution . . . came about not during his lifetime but soon after his death. But the foundations for the technological development were laid during Nehru’s time.

However, by the mid-sixties, the impact of certain long-term trends, as well as several immediate imperatives coincided with critical scientific breakthroughs to create a conjuncture which called for and enabled a big push towards the New Agricultural Strategy.

Despite the very creditable growth of agricultural output between 1949 and 1965 of about 3 per cent per annum, India was facing food shortages since the mid-fifties and in the mid-sixties she was in the throes of a crisis. Agricultural growth had begun to stagnate in the early sixties. The massive jump in population growth rates after independence, to about 2.2 per cent per annum from about 1 per cent in the previous half century, the slow but steady rise in per capita income, and the huge (and rising with each Plan) outlay towards planned industrialization, put long-term pressures on Indian agriculture, creating, for example, a demand for food which Indian markets were not able to meet fully. From the mid-fifties, food prices experienced an upward push. To meet the food shortage and to stabilize prices India was forced to import increasing amounts of food. The alternative was to go in for large-scale forced procurements from the countryside at huge human cost, a path which was unacceptable in India but was adopted by other countries like Russia or China which did not have democracy as a safeguard. The controversial agreements made by India to import food from the US under the PL-480 scheme started in 1956. Nearly three million tonnes of foodgrains were imported under this scheme in the very first year and the volume of imports kept rising thereafter, reaching more than four and a half million tonnes in 1963.

In this situation came the two wars with China (1962) and Pakistan (1965) and two successive drought years in 1965-66 leading to fall in agricultural output by 17 per cent and food output by 20 per cent. Food prices shot up, rising at the rate of nearly 20 per cent per annum between
1965 and 1968. India was forced to import more than ten million tonnes of foodgrains in 1966. It is in this moment of crisis, with famine conditions emerging in various parts of the country, especially in Bihar and U.P., that the US threatened to renege on commitments of food exports to India. The Indo-Pak war, India’s stand on Vietnam and the desire to arm twist India into accepting an economic policy package favoured by the US had convinced President Johnson that India should be put ‘on a short leash’ and what better way to do it than to cynically use India’s desperate dependence on the US for food!

Given this scenario of the mid-sixties, economic self-reliance and particularly food self-sufficiency became the top priority objectives of Indian economic policy and for that matter of foreign policy. The New Agricultural Strategy began to be implemented in right earnest. The then prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Food Minister, C. Subramaniam, and Indira Gandhi, who followed Shastri in 1966 after his brief tenure, all gave full support to and crafted this basic transition in the strategy for developing Indian agriculture. The World Bank-appointed Bell Mission recommended such a transition and the US pressed in its favour, but they appear to have been ‘leaning on open doors’, as a considerable consensus in favour of such a change had emerged within India. Critical inputs like High-Yield Variety (HYV) seeds (the suitability to Indian conditions of the high-yielding Mexican dwarf wheat proved to be an extremely timely scientific breakthrough), chemical fertilizers and pesticides, agricultural machinery including tractors, pump sets, etc., soil-testing facilities, agricultural education programmes and institutional credit were concentrated on areas which had assured irrigation and other natural and institutional advantages. Some 32 million acres of land, about 10 per cent of the total cultivated area, was, thus, initially chosen for receiving the package programme benefits on top priority.

Government investment in agriculture rose significantly. Institutional finance made available to agriculture doubled between 1968 to 1973. The Agricultural Prices Commission was set up in 1965 and efforts were made to see that the farmer was assured a market at sustained remunerative prices. Public investment, institutional credit, remunerative prices and the availability of the new technology at low prices raised the profitability of private investment by farmers and as a result the total gross capital formation in agriculture began to grow faster. This was reflected in, for example, the rate of increate in the gross irrigated area rising from about 1 million hectares per annum in the pre-Green Revolution period to about 2.5 million hectares per annum during the seventies. Also, between 1960-61 and 1970-71 the number of electric and diesel pumpsets increased from 421,000 to 2.4 million, tube wells increased from 90,000 to 460,000 and tractors from 31,000 to 140,000. Also, consumption of chemical fertilizers, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, increased from 306,000 metric tonnes in 1960-61 to 2,350,000 in 1970-71. Most of this increase occurred in the second half of the period.

The results of this new strategy began to be witnessed within a short
period. Between 1967-68 and 1970-71 foodgrain production rose by 35 per cent. Again, between 1964-65 and 1971-72 aggregate food production increased from 89 to 112 million tonnes, calculated to be a 10 per cent per capita increase. Net food imports fell from 10.3 million tonnes 1966 to 3.6 million in 1970, while food availability increased from 73.5 million tonnes to 99.5 million tonnes over the same period. It has been estimated that ‘but for the new agricultural strategy India would have to import a minimum of about 8 to 10 million tons of wheat yearly at a cost of $600 to 800 million.’
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Food availability continued to increase sharply to 110.25 million tonnes in 1978 and 128.8 million tonnes in 1984, putting an end to India’s ‘begging bowl’ image. By the eighties, not only was India self-sufficient in food with buffer food stocks of over 30 million tonnes, but it was even exporting food to pay back earlier loans or as loans to food-deficit countries. It was this comfortable situation which enabled India to successfully deal with the severe and widespread droughts of 1987 and 1988 without large-scale foreign help as was needed in the mid-sixties. Today, by the end of nineties, foodgrain production in India is nearly 200 million tonnes, up from 51 million tonnes in 1950-51, a growth rate of about 3 per cent, ahead of the high population growth rate of 2.1 per cent.

A major impact of the Green Revolution strategy was that through increases in agricultural yields it enabled India to maintain, once again, the high rate of agricultural growth achieved since independence. The average rate of growth achieved between 1949-50 to 1989-90 was about 2.7 per cent per annum. In the pre-Green Revolution period, 1949-50 to 1964-65, about 51 per cent of the growth in agricultural output was accounted for by increase in area (which grew at 1.61 per cent per year) and 49 per cent by increase in yield (which grew at 1.5 per cent per year), i.e., both area and yield increases were equally important in maintaining growth levels. Once the possibilities of area increases reached a saturation point rapid yield increases became necessary if a similar growth rate was to be maintained. This is what the Green Revolution strategy succeeded in doing. Between 1967-68 and 1989-90 about 80 per cent of the growth of agricultural output was explained by increases in yields per acre (which grew at 2.5 per cent per year) while increase in acreage (which grew only at 0.26 per cent per year) explained only 20 per cent. In fact, in recent years, virtually the entire output growth has been attributed to increases in yield, as agricultural acreage has remained stagnant and even shrunk.

It must be recognized that, apart from the maintaining of the agricultural growth rates, the critical impact of the Green Revolution was that it generated a rapid increase in the marketable surplus of foodgrains. This aspect has perhaps not been sufficiently highlighted. A number of factors explain why the New Agricultural Strategy generated large marketable surpluses; the fact that the initial breakthrough in food production occurred in the relatively developed regions in north-western India and parts of southern India where food consumption levels were already high meant that a large proportion of the additional output was marketed; the use of labour per unit of output tended to decline, creating
a marketable surplus from the rural areas to the extent that the proportion of the output which had to set aside for consumption by labour declined; and the fact that output increases occurred mainly as a result of yield increases and not increases in acreage led to a fall in the need for foodgrain as seed per unit of output.

It was the marketed surpluses as a result of the Green Revolution (and not any unprecedented rise in aggregate all India growth rates) which enabled internal procurement of food by the government and the building up of large food stocks. The food requirements generated by a strategy of rapid industrial development, the rapidly growing urban and general population and the periodically food-deficit areas could now be met internally. The liberation from dependence on PL-480 or other imports for the above was a major step in the direction of self-reliant independent development for India.

However, doubts about the New Agricultural Strategy began to be expressed from the very early stages of its implementation. One persistent argument had been that by concentrating resources on the regions that already had certain advantages the Green Revolution strategy was further accentuating regional inequality. Clearly, the solution to such fears lay in spreading the Green Revolution further and not opposing it per se. The research of scholars like G.S. Bhalla
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show that instead of promoting further inequality, the Green Revolution has over time actually spread to large parts of the country bringing prosperity to these regions. In the first phase of the Green Revolution, 1962-65 to 1970-73, an all-India compound growth rate of 2.08 per cent per year was achieved but it was mainly the result of sharp increases in yield in wheat in the north-western region of Punjab, Haryana and western U.P., which grew at a much faster rate than the average, Punjab registering a stupendous rate of 6.63 per cent. In the second phase, 1970-73 to 1980-83, with the extension of HYV seed technology from wheat to rice, the Green Revolution spread to other parts of the country, notably eastern U.P., Andhra Pradesh, particularly the coastal areas, parts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and so on. Regions like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh now grew much faster than the all-India growth rate of 2.38 per cent per year. The third, and the most recent phase of the Green Revolution, 1980-83 to 1992-95, shows very significant and encouraging results. The Green Revolution now spread to the erstwhile low-growth areas of the eastern region of West Bengal, Bihar, Assam and Orissa, with West Bengal achieving an unprecedented growth rate of 5.39 per cent per annum. Other regions, particularly the southern region and Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan of the central region grew rapidly as well. In fact, for the first time, the southern region registered a higher rate of growth than the north-western region. By the end of the third phase, the coefficient of variation of the output growth levels and yield (per hectare) levels between the various states had fallen substantially compared to earlier decades. This period, therefore, saw not only a marked overall (all India) acceleration of the growth of agricultural output touching an unprecedented growth rate of 3.4 per cent per year, but also
witnessed a much more diversified growth pattern, considerably reducing regional inequality by increasing the spread of rural prosperity.