Abstract:
In the historiographies of technology and of development, some events have become almost foundational examples of "success". The Green Revolution is a key case. Social scientists and ecologists have produced enough critique of the Green Revolution to fill a medium sized public library. Nevertheless the image of the Green Revolution as an example of the successful application of innovation to the problem of development has persisted. This is due to the notion that food grain production increased, and that this increase was due to the adoption of so-called miracle seeds, called High Yielding Varieties (HYVs). This paper presents a new history of irrigation and food production in twentieth-century India. It seeks to challenge the standard narrative of Green Revolution, to question the role of plant breeding in the history of twentieth century agriculture and to de-centre the big dam from our picture of water and modernity.
There is no evidence of a breakthrough the 1960s and 1970s where a Green Revolution is typically placed; this was in fact a period of relatively slow growth in production and yields. Wheat, which was a small part of India's food basket was an exception to this general trend. This paper argues that the HYVs had little to do with the leap in wheat yields. This was driven by a quick expansion in irrigation facilitated by private tubewells.
Interwar colonial India had the world's largest public tubewell programme, and the perceived ability of tubewells to deliver quick results won government favor during the Second World War. The emphasis on public irrigation (whether from tubewells or dams) increased during the Nehruvian period. The mid-1960s however saw an emphasis on the private tubewell, based on a vision of the peasant as a rational profit-maximizing being who was in conflict with public irrigation systems and their equity objectives. The private-profit motive assumed policy centre-stage, and aided by the World Bank, the government mounted a programme of cheap loans to promote private tubewells. These quickly became the most important means of irrigation in India.
Putting the tubewell at the heart of the Green Revolution story allows us to re-conceptualize late twentieth-century Indian agriculture and understand how rising inequality was built into technology choice. The new centrality of the private motive in agricultural policy may be traced to Nobel Prize-winning Chicago economist Theodore Schultz's theory of the poor but efficient peasant. Ideas about peasant rationality were also central to the adoption of the HYVs, and merely justified unequal resource allocation without leading to higher production.
Bio:
Kapil Subramanian is a historian of technology trained at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur as well as Imperial College, London and King's College, London. He is currently engaged in climate policy research at the Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi.