Agricultural Modernisation and Education: Contours of a Point of Departure Author(s): Krishna Kumar Reviewed work(s): Source: Economic and

Political Weekly, Vol. 31, No. 35/37, Special Number (Sep., 1996), pp. 2367-2369+2371-2373 Published by: Economic and Political Weekly Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4404558 . Accessed: 21/03/2012 06:35
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Agricultural Modernisation and

Krishna Kumar

Education

Contoursof a Pointof Departure

The English-speaking ruilinig elites of the 1960s were keen to propagate the US-inspired strategy of agricultural modernisation based on modern technologies. This was reflected in the Kothari Commission report on education, which sidelined the concept of basic education in favour of general elementary educationfor rural children intended to inculcate a scientific outlook.
THE year 1966 was an unusuallyimportant year in the history of independentIndia. As time goes by, it appears that 1966 might qualify to be seen as a turningpoint in postindependence history, or at least as a year when certain existing tendencies consolidated to bring about a virtual end of the The earliereraandits contradictions. broader contours of this year are familiar enough, but it may be useful to recall them briefly for the sake of easy referencelater.The year startedwith the death of the prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, less than two years after he had succeeded JawaharlalNehru. His death came as a sudden end to the dramaticevent of a war with Pakistan - a war which influenced not only India's economic and social priorities for a long time to come but also her placement in the political geography of her neighbourhood. Only three years earlier India had to fight a war with China. Though the outcome of the 1965 war was ratherdifferent from the one fought in 1962, both wars contributed to the self-perceptionof India as a country surrounded hostile neighbours.The war by with Pakistanwas fought at a time marked by the shortage of staple food, mainly on accountof the failureof the monsoon which was to be repeatedin 1966. The perception of food scarcitybeing just as crucial a battle to be won as the war with Pakistan was reflected in the slogan that Shastri gave to as thenationin hisbrieftenure primeminister:
'jai jawan, jai kisan'.

This slogan served to give Shastri a sort of halo in the popular mind which he otherwise would not have had, given the brevity of his tenure and his unassuming Inboththeseaspectshe presented personality. a contrast to Jawaharlal Nehru. Shastri's image, or ratherits contrast with Nehru's image, seems to have played a major role in shaping the internalpolitics of the ruling CongressPartyandeven the generalpolitical landscape of India in the post-Nehru interregnum, which concluded with the choice of IndiraGandhi as prime minister after Shastri's sudden death in early 1966. It has been said that Shastri's period representsa weakening of decision-making mechanisms in the Congress Party.' If it is true, at least a part of the explanation lies

in the 'de-centring' that Nehru's demise implied, given his charismatic personality andhis recordas a fighterfor independence, particularly associationwith Gandhi.But in weakening' is a word one sees repeatedin Shastri's period and then, after him, in the context of social fabric and the economy. One sphere in which the social fabric was frequently reportedto be showing signs of weaknessthroughout 1966was thatof youthrelationships. An upsurge of student aduIlt agitations seems to have taken the adult society by surprisce2Crisisof values, decline of character,weakening of social control, andinfluenceof politics were the conceptual tools with the help of which commentators of the periodtriedto explain why youth had become so restive and indisciplified.And if politics was among the factorsaffecting the young, it did not seem to be doing too well in its own world of organising state policy. The biggest challenges in political life had to do withongoing resistanceto landreforms and economic pressures from the World Bank and the United States on an already deeply indebted economy.3 Large landowners constituted a major component of the social forces which had been working for some time to undermine the weak but significant moves made in the 1950s towards making the distributionof land less iniquitous. These moves had two and main objectives: social transformation improvement of agriculturalproductivity. While morethan70 percent of thepopulation depended on land, one-third of this populationwas landless and nearly half the people who owned land had less than an acre. Abolition of the zamindarisystem and the impositionof landceiling were the major to steps which had been taken underNehru' amelioratethis situation.The real value of these steps was greatly reducedby the time taken to put them into effect and the legal loopholes left in them which enabled the target groups to circumvent them.4 These groups had also succeeded in corneringthe major share of the benefits providedby the state under the Community Development Programmeand the schemes launchedlater to mobilise co-operative action and public creditfor the poor.Yet, despitetheirsuccess in manipulating the state's attempts to

equalise material opportunities, the rich landowners, their political representatives, and many articulate groups in the urban intelligentsiapersistedin theirperceptionof the government's approachcarrying signs of a 'communist'approachwhich neededto be resisted. In order to appreciatethe authenticityof such an apprehensionit is necessary to step a little deeper into the atmosphereof ideas prevailing in India in the mid-1960s. The cold war had spread far enough to form social territories of intellectual influence wielded by the two super-powers,the US and the USSR. The former had a distinct edge as faras the Indianintellectualterritory was concerned.Freeenterpriseandfreedom of expression('culturalfreedom')wereused as signposts of protection against the onslaught of communism. The contrary constructionwas struggleagainstAmerican imperialism. With its small but influential English-educated elite, Indiawas attractively placed to receive American influence in differentspheresof its civic life, particularly in the spheresof highereducation,administration and the media. Direct political influence was of course a matterof constant effort, and for this economic pressure, especially in the context of food scarcity and indebtedness, was a readily available instrument. In the background of India's external policy choices, the applicationof economic pressure,directly by America or throughthe World Bank, took increasingly crude forms even as America's feeling of its loneliness in its aggression against Vietnam grew. But culturaland intellectual means of building a domestic hegemony in favourof America's long-terminterestswas just as crucial as the relentless application of pressure on the food front and India's agricultural policy. The generalpresenceof American names, topics and textbooks subsidised to attractthe Indianstudentand teacher - in the syllabi of Indian universities was supplemented by provision of scholarships for research and professional work in America. The dominance enjoyed by American media, especially its news agencies, and the popularityof magazines like Time, Life, and Reader's Digest, provided yet another layer of support to the

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of construction anethos favouringAmerican involvementin India's civic life. No Soviet media agency could performthis function, given the natureof the Soviet press and the conditions of its operation in the home country.Subsidised popularmagazines and children's books did slightly better, but the Soviet presence remained marginal to the public space occupied by the Englisheducated Indian intelligentsia. The same couldbe said of Soviet textbooksandstudent exchange programmes. of Besidesthecreation anintellectual ethos, specific efforts were made to facilitate the penetration of India's fledgling industrial economy, especially the upcoming sector of industries involved in agriculture. Devaluation of the Indian currency and concessions for foreign fertilisercompanies were the two major targets of American pressure.These were manifestpressures;far less visible were sustained research and promotion efforts to find the means of supplyingtechnicalsolutionsto food scarcity involving the use of Americanagrobusiness products.These attempts had begun in the 1950s, but up until the early 1960s ideas of technicalimprovementin agriculturehad to compete with socio-political solutions involving redistribution land and erosion of of traditional structures dominance.Wars of with China and Pakistan, two consecutive failures of the monsoon, and Nehru's death were among the factors which could be said to have acceleratedthe pressuresfavouring technical solutions, but external conditions andforces undoubtedlyplayed an important role too. The sequential structure of this dramain India was not very different from whathadhappenedin Mexico earlier.5 What precipitated the pressure on India - her government, especially its food minister in the mid-1960s to fully embracetechnical remedieswas a dramaticdevelopmentin the US. The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 had given rise to an unprecedented public debate on the degradationof the environment due to the use of chemicals in agriculture. The adverse publicityandlegislative actiongeneratedby the debate made American fertiliser and pesticide companies intensify their search for foreign markets.The US departmentof agriculture a "wholly owned subsidiaryof the pesticide industry", accordingto Ehrlich (1978) - and the World Bank were directly leading this search. Indiaoffereda highlysuitableenvironment for the combined growth of American agrobusiness, including its interests in fertilisers,pesticides,andhybridseeds. Here was a country with a growing population, prone to malaria,apprehensiveof famines, andsocially led by a westwardlooking class of post-colonial elites. And it had a huge body of professionallytrainedmanpowerin

the sciences and the social sciences which had been socialised to view desirable change and improvementin India in terms taught by western, especially American, experts. Above all else, India had a vast farming sector waiting to be penetratedby the countless meanings of the word 'modernisation'. Agriculturaluniversities, set up after the model of American landgrant colleges, had initiated the process of shaping Indian expertise under American guidance. Although these universities were not in a position to provide the kind of opportunitiesof close interactionbetween industrialists,engineers and farmersas the land-grant colleges in America had been opened to provide [Noble 19771, they had nevertheless begun to performthe simpler role of propagatingthe virtueand means of profit-seeking among the bigger farmers. The inevitableimage of the capitalistfarmer as a model lay embedded in the new knowledge and attitudes that agricultural universities and research organisations in India were to provide with American help, both in terms of training of experts and financial help. EDUCATION COMMISSION The mid-1960s, and particularly year the 1966, are also importantin the history of post-independenceeducation in-India.The Education Commission -(EC), popularly known as Kothari Commission after the name of its scientist chairmanD S Kothari, was appointedin July 1964, andit submitted its reporttwo years later in June 1966. No other reporthas received as much attention in the context of educationas the Education Commission Report (ECR) has over these 30 yearssince its submission.Itsvoluminous size - it runsinto some 1,000 printedpages - justified by its all-encompasingframe of reference,and its association with J P Naik who served as its member-secretary, give it a uniqueplace on the shelves of institutional and office libraries concerned with the and planning studyof education. constitutes It a 'whole' perspective on education, in the sense thatjust aboutevery stage and aspect of education is discussed by it, unlike the two majorcommission reportsprecedingit and the two others written afterwards.But whatgives ECRits distinctiveplace in social history is its articulationof the agenda of modemisation.If one were to summariseits thousandpages in one word,the wordwould surely be 'modernisation'.The title of the report, in fact, reveals this single most importanttheme by linking 'educationand national development'.Modemisation meant nation-buildingthrough development, and educationwas the primeinstrumentfor this projectin the discourse of the 1960s which the ECR signifies. Myrdal,an admirer the of

ECR, summarised it by saying that it envisageda changein theattitudes values and of 'the whole people' undera socio-cultural revolution oriented towards modemisation (1970). The opening chapterof the ECR provides us with a hierarchyof nationalproblemsto which 'nationaldevelopment'mustprovide a remedy. Agriculturalmodemisationis the remedy for the first of these four key problems; self-sufficiency in food; economic growth and full employment;social and national integration; and political development. That this ordering is no coincidence or an editorial choice alone is clarifiedin thefirstsentenceof thediscussion: "The first and the most importantof these (problems) is food". This is followed by a quotation from Gandhi: "If God were to appearto India,he will have to takethe form of a loaf of bread."The paragraph then goes on to establish the importance of selfsufficiencyby referring therateof increase to in population.Using a 20-year perspective, the ECR says that even if the birth-rateis reduced by half, about 46 per cent of the 1966 populationwill be addedby 1986. "On the basis of presenttrends",the reportsays, "in another10-15 yeaTs,no countryis likely to havea surplusof food to export". Precisely what trendsthe EC had in mind is not clear, but the rhetoricalvalue of this statementis indicated in the next sentence which says: "Even if such surpluses existed, we would have no resources to import the huge quantitiesof food required, even to import or the fertilisers needed". The basis of giving top priority to food self-sufficiency thus stood verified: it is not "merelya desirable but a condition for survival" (p 4). The themeof self-sufficiencyin food finds recurring mention throughout the first chapter.It is emphasisedtime andagainthat self-sufficiency in food canonly be achieved by applying the principles of science to agriculture.The concept of science is seen as being synonymous with that of modernisation. Science-based technology is said to define the difference between traditional andmodemsocieties."Inatraditional society production is based largely on empirical processes, experience, and trial and error, ratherthan on science; in a modem society, it is basically rooted in science" (p. 12). 'Science' is treated here as an institution ratherthan as an approachto knowledge, or else it would be difficult to see why the empiricism of the so-called traditional societies, based on trialand errorbehaviour andexperience,does not qualifyto be called science. In the structure meaningthatthe of ECR builds for its argument, science is a apparently symbol, or rathera synecdoche in which a symbol stands for something much bigger of which it is a part.It is meant to remind us of a complex set of values

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which together stand for 'modernisation'. These values include a secular outlook, freedom from traditionalways of thinking, andfaithin change.The last item is recorded with reference to the irreversabilityof the steps taken towards the goal of modernisation. The text says: "If one. tinkers with the problemsinvolved or tries to marchwith faltering steps, if one's commitments and convictions are half-hearted and faith is lacking, the new situation (ie, the situation representingthe outcome of our efforts to modernise) may turn out to be worse than the old one" (p 32) (emphasis added). One can hardlymiss the threatembeddedin these words and its use to counter all doubts and debates that might be raised in the context of modernisation.Thirty years later today we can notice how the discourseof scientific temperandmodemisationwas so dependent on the tenacity of faith in them. It is also clear thatit was unableto accommodatethe critics of modernisationdespite according a place of honour to Mahatma Gandhi's words in the outset of the discussion on national development. The details of the EC's strategy for applying education towards achieving the modemisationappearin goal of agricultural ChapterXIV which is titled 'Educationfor Agriculture'.Two majorrecommendations madein this chapterstandout. One concerns the promotion of specialised higher education in agriculture as a science by the establishmentof an agriculture universityin each stateanda relatedancillaryinstitutional The othermajorrecommendation structure. is to rejecttheBasicEducation(BE) approach in favour of a general, academic elemenIt tary educationprogramme. is easy to grasp the rationalefor the first, for it is consistent with the EC's overall perspective on modernisation agriculture. ECRtakes of The pains to elaborate on the requirementsof in modernisation agricultureto the extent of projecting manpower requirements for trained'agriculturalists', graduatefarmers, ie, in the coming years. In this context, the ECR comes closer than in any other chapter to mentioning the ground reality or the socioeconomic conditions in which educational developmentwas to take place. As Malcom Adiseshiah pointed out in his foreword to Naik's Education Commission and After (1982), the EC avoided the dangerof falling between normative and positive positions by deliberatelychoosing the normativepath. It is interestingto note thatwhile projecting the manpower needs for agricultural modemisation the EC saw fit to take the positive routeby noticing the prevalence of a highly iniquitous distribution of land in Indian society. It is another,end of course a highly significant, matter that the distribution does not disturb the EC. It recognises that ";at present there are nearly

6 million farms of 15 acres or more (out of 50 million farms)"(p 669). This mild and brief acknowledgementis made in orderto explain the projectedfigure of farmerswho might become graduates in the next two decades: "If we assume that ownershipwill change at 3 percent a year,this meansnearly 2,00,000 new farmersinheritingsuch farms every year. It seems reasonableto thinkthat by 1986, 1in 50 of thesemaybe anagriculture graduate"(p 669). This statement should suffice to reveal whatrole the EC envisaged for educatipnin the context of the severely inequal access to land in ruralsociety. The role was to enable the bigger landownersto enhance their material opportunities. This was the vision embeddedin the new strategyof agricultural modemisationwhich was named a little later as the green revolution. That the ECR should be so happily reconciled to the green revolution strategy of rich landowners being given priority attention in order to enable them to act as pace-setters is hardly surprising.Members of the EC's agriculture education subcommittee included the representativesof just aboutevery section of the establishment of agricultural research. The agriculture universities at Pant Nagar and Bangalore, the Indian Agriculture Research Institute, the IndianCouncil of AgricultureResearch, and the FertiliserAssociation of India were among the organisationsrepresentedin the sub-committee. TheRockefellerFoundation, which had been active in supporting modernisation researchin Latin agricultural America and Asia, was also representedin theEC's sub-committee. AlthoughtheIndian agricultureresearch apparatusas a whole had developed under American guidance, the Rockefeller Foundation's presence in India at the time needs to be appreciated for its own sake. In collaboration with the Indian Council for AgriculturalResearch, the Rockefeller Foundation had been promoting research for the production of high-yielding varieties of staple crops in wheat.By the time theEC India,particularly was established, the foundation had reported exciting breakthroughs in similar in programmes Mexico andthe Philippines. The central theme of these success stories was the new wheat plant's ability to guzzle chemical fertilisers along with water without falling over. Only veryresolutelyneutral students of post-war economic history can doubtthatthe edifice of the new knowledge and researchin agriculturewas constructed at least partly to boost the interests of Americanfertiliserindustry,and not just to protect the earth's poor from hunger. The final thing worth noticing in the composition of the EC's sub-committee on agriculture education was the complete absence of anyone representingGandhian rural institutions. A liberal approach to

framing the group on agriculture and education would surely have taken the existence of these institutionsinto account, especially when the group was going to deliberate on the fate of basic educationas a model for elementary-levelschooling.We canlegitimatelysuspectthatGandhians were kept out of the sub-committee in order to avoid any dilution that might occur due to theirpresencein the course chartedfor rural education in general and agriculture education in particular.
BASIC EDUCATION

The EC's standagainstbasic educationis recor4ed in the subsection entitled 'AgriculturalEducationin Schools (Classes I to X)'. This subsection starts by taking note of the prevailing position of agriculturerelated instructionin primaryschools as a craft in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. These three states are singled out as instances on the ground that in the remaining states the number of schools offering agricultureeducationas a 'craft'an essential part of the diction of basic education - is less than the proportionin Maharashtra. choosing Maharashtra By as the lower cut-off point for portrayingthe limited achievement of basic education, measured in terms of the introductionof as agriculture a craft,the EC is able to ignore all other states. Apparently,the EC chose this editorial device in orderto make basic educationlook a minordevelopment.Also, in the vocabulary associated with basic education,all ruralcrafts were perceivedas being related to agricultureand rural life. The primarycraftaroundwhich a greatdeal of the basic school curriculumwas structured was weaving, which included spinning. By denying the relationshipbetween weaving and agriculture, the EC achieved two sementic purposes: one, minimising the spreadof basic educationin the context of agriculture-related education; two, promoting the new, modern concept of as agriculture a craftunrelatedto the diverse traditional craftsassociatedwith village life. Having demonstratedthatthe inputmade by basic education into direct training of children in agriculture as a craft was so limited,the subsectionunderdiscussion goes on to make its negative recommendation. The words used for this purpose are so remarkably indirect and carefully chosen that they deserve to be quoted in full. The quotationis also valuable for it recordsthe thoughtprocessesinvolvedin thewithdrawal of official support for what was the only majorattemptmade in our countryto move education away from its colonial legacy: As has been madeclearat severalplacesin
the chapter, massive application of scientific knowledge and skills is basic to the

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modernisation of our agriculture. We recommend, therefore, theperiodwhich that can be spent in schools should be utilised in imparting soundgeneraleducation, a with particular emphasis mathematics the on and sciences. This, we feel, would be the best preparation copingwiththerapid for changes thatarebound characterise agriculture to our in future.It is because of these and other considerations we have been unableto that endorsethe organisation formalcourses of in the schools for educating the primary producer(p 659). Why did theEC choose such heavily cloaked words? Indeed, 'being unable to endorse" is indirectenough, but "the organisationof formal courses in the schools for educating the primary producer"takes the cake for opacity in the historyof official educational jargon. This long phrase has been used in lieu of 'basic education'. As a scheme of instruction, basic education did indeed representan organisationof formal courses aimed at trainingthe child in a productive craft, but the point could have been made more simple. The reason for the EC's choice of an indirect,opaquereferenceto basic education is easy to surmise. It is simply the need to be politically acceptable.The association of Mahatma Gandhi's name with basic education had given it a halo and an extraofficial status. It is not that progress in the introducing basic approachhadachieved extraordinary speed anywhere,butthe effort hadhadconsistentofficial support access and to Plan funds. All of the first three Plan documents had discussed basic primary education with enthusiasm and a certain degree of imagination. The Second FiveYearPlandocume,nt(,1956-61), forinstance, hadmentionedthe need to link basic schools with development activiti s. taking place in the village. The ThirdPlandocument(196166) repeatsthis and records the intentionof converting all teacher training institutions into the basic approach.In contrast to this enthusiasm, the draft outline of the Fourth Plan,publishedin August 1966 - thatis, two months after the submission of ECR - has just a one-line mention of basic education: 'Basic education will be strengthened by developing carefully selected schools and introducingin other schools work-oriented curriculaand citizenship training' (p 314). This mention is consistent with the line taken by ECR in anothersection which we will presently discuss, namely, that of replacing basic education with 'work experience', suggesting that the two are the same. But even this brief mention of basic education disappeared in the final Fourth Plan document. The dispensability of Gandhi and his approachto education had a wider context. By themid-1960s thelegitimacyof Gandhi' s perspectiveon developmentwas reducedto

the minimum.It is a well-groundedpopular belief that Nehru's perspective on India's development was antagonistic to that of Gandhi. In a recent review of Nehru's policies, Parekh (1995) has argued that in thelaterpart his primeministership, of Nehru grew somewhat receptive towards the priorities and institutions associated with Gandhi.If this readinghas validity, Nehru's death marked the end of whatever token presenceGandhi'srecalcitrant legacy hadin the highest decision-making structures.In any case, the war with China had given a strongimpetusto these structures moving for towards untrammelled modernisation of defence and defence-related scientificindustrial infrastructure. Needless to say, the urban intelligentsia, including the bureaucracy, agreed on this matterwith the leaders of industry and trade. Many other changes took place in the early 1960s, symbolisingthe impendingend of Gandhi's utility as a reference point for determinationof policy. In education, the setting up of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in 1962 markedthe closure of a periodin which Gandhi'sideas in education were held as being important.The opening of central schools to cater to the needs of uniongovernment functionaries transferrable throughout country, theestablishment the and of theCentralBoardof SecondaryEducation (CBSE), were in harmonywith theemerging ethos.These stepshada functionalrationale, buttheyalsohadlatentsymbolicsignificance. They markedthe consolidationof a national ,eliteandthegrantof freedomto it to transcend the constraintsof local or provincialsocioeconomic realitiess. Theirexistence madethe problems of decentralised planning in education- whichhadaxiomaticimportance in Gandhi's approach- look irrelevant to progress.The use of 'national'and 'central' in thenamingof theseorganisations permitted a disproportionateamount of funds to be spent on a privilegedsection of society. The naming also allowed them to tighten their holdoverthesymbolicinheritanceof colonial rule. This process of the final transfer of colonial symbolic assets to a national elite was most visible in the context of language. Contraryto the recommendationof every panel ever set by the governmentover the question of medium of instruction, the NCERT,the centralschools, and the CBSE were able to patronise English whose as continuation anassociateofficial language of the union was ratified in 1967. The use of English by these institutions had a functional justification, but the symbolic underpinningsof this justification were far more significant if seen against the backgroundof the political and economic forces vying to shape the Indian nation in the 1960s.

Writing of the ECR was a part of this processof thecreationof a nationaldiscourse on development. Its common-sense value lay in the fact that India needed a national system of educationjust as it had a national system of railways, postal services, and so on. What made the task in education somewhat inconvenient was the climate createdby Gandhi'sidea of basic education, althoughthe ZakirHussainCommitteehad tried to give a 'national' label to it at the time of its inception. Both as an ideology and as a scheme of instruction,basic educationwas not compatiblewith the demands that a nationally organised system might make. Ideologically, it was supposed to be sustained localcommunities, by localmarkets and the local environment.As a scheme of instruction, it was rooted in the idea that learning arises out of children's interaction with the real world in their immediate vicinity. This interaction was supposed to be guided and enriched by the use of the local language, locally available material, and the teaching of locally practised productiveskills. The teacher'sactive membershipof the communitywas assumed,and where it was not possible (as in the case of someone brought in from elsewhere), a teacherwasexpectedto achieveitby personal effort and participation.It was mainly due to this concern that housing for the teacher was considered an essential part of the school design.8Clearly,the conceptof basic education could not be an attractive proposition for investment of scarce resources from the perspective of the planners of 'national' development. The phasing out of basic education is explained with a little less tight brevity elsewherein theECR.InChapter VIII,which is about school curriculum,the reason why basic education needs to be substitutedby the incorporationof work-experiencein a general academic curriculumis mentioned: The programmeof basic education did for involve work-experience all childrenin the primaryschools, thoughthe activities proposed were concerned with the crafts thevillageemployment and indigenous patterns.If in practicebasic educationhas certain becomelargelyfrozenaround crafts, there is no denying the fact that it always stressed the vital prin-cipleof relating education to productivity.What is now needed is a reorientation of the basic education programmeto the needs of a with society thathas to be transformed the help of science and technology. In other must be forwardwords, work-experience of lookingin keepingwith the character the new social order(p 351). This commentary suggestion that basic education was deficient in two respects: in getting confined to certain crafts, and two, in being incompatible with the promotion of science and technology. The list of work

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experiencesgiven by the EC is indeed long, consisting of some 16 activities for lower and upper primary stages alone. The last itemon this list is 'workin the farm' (p 364). The chapteron agricultureand education, which we have discussed earlier, also mentions the need to orient the school curriculum towardsagriculture, even in urban schools. This was supposed to be done not by introducingagricultureas a subject, but ratherby orienting the existing courses in generalscience, biology, social studies and mathematicstowardsthe ruralenvironment and the problems facing 'the Indian community' (p 660). These discussions do look a little incoherent, but the point conveyedis clear:thatacurriculum structured aroundthe ideological preferencesof basic education will be replaced by a general in academiccurriculum whichtheexperience of productivework will be given a place of sorts. The image of learnersimplied in this new alternativeis that of 'forwardlooking and progressive farmers' whose prototype, as we notedearlier,wereto be foundamongst "the third of the cultivators who now own more than half of the agriculturalland" (p 661). They were to serve as the initial demonstrators the manyfinancialbenefits of of the packageknown as 'improvedfarming whichincludedchemicalfertilisers, practices; pesticides,hybridseeds, andthe new farming machinery. Ouranalysisimpliesthatin thenew climate of ruraldevelopmentprioritieswhich theEC anticipated, the idea of equal opportunity was to be confined to education; in the materialcontext, the decision to give greater opportunityto the richer farmers had been taken. Its justification lay in the rhetoric which projectedself-sufficiency in food as an isolated objective, and the applicationof science and technology - both in the form currently recognised by American agrobusiness-research apparatus- as the sole meansof achievingit.Thus,a sharpmismatch was enforced: planned deepening of inequalities in the material opportunity structure,and the projectionof meritocratic equal opportunityin education. It is hardly surprising that the former plan made the latter thoroughly invalid. The green revolution strategydid indeed achieve selfsufficiencyin one areaof food supply,namely cereal, but it exacerbated the stratification of ruralsociety, most glaringly in the parts of the country where it was applied most intensively, butelsewhere too. It pauperised the middle-range peasant and forced the smallerpeasant becomea landlesslabourer, to a likely migrantto an urbanslum. The trend was clear within the first few years of the implementationof the agriculturalmodernisationstrategy.By thetime the 1971census was taken, tbe proportion of agricultural labourers in the rural population had

increased by as much as 11 per cent over the last census: from 18.8 per cent to 29.9 percent. As a commentaryby Mehta(1973) noted, Indiawas witnessing a concentration of land ratherthan its redistribution. Destitution of the landless and small peasants, and prosperity of the big landowners became the norm, leading to, and being reinforced by, the increasing of in dominance thelargelandowners politics. The changes introduced in agricultural policies in the mid-1960s made a critical difference to the means by which the richer farmerscould exercise theirhegemony over therestof thevillagepopulation. changes The that benefited them most included the provision support of pricesby thegovemment foragricultural of availability credit products, for purchase of hybrid seeds, chemical fertilisers,andfarmmachinery, subsidies and on the sale of fertilisers.The precise manner in which the bigger landowners (in many parts of the country they were the exzamindars membersof princelyfamilies) and dominated the village political scene so as to corner the lion's share of state benefits and new commercialopportunitiesdiffered fromstateto state.Thepicture theVindhyain Gangetic belt of the north was close to the in one SrilalShuklaportrayed Raag Darbari (1968). The portrayal focuses on the absolute hold of a single family on the village cooperative society, the gram sabha, and the governingbodyof thelocal college. Drawing on a case studyof a village in theNorthArcot

district of Tamil Nadu, Kurien (1992) has depictedtheemergenceof new dependencies even as old ones were getting erodedowing to the changes in agriculturalprductivity. The new agriculturerequiresstable sources of water. Commercial selling of water by well-owners, according to this study, has sharply enhanced their power and status. One otheraspectof the ECR's supportfor agriculturalmodernisationthat was being intensified in the mid-1960s is relevant to this discussion. In its opening chapter discussed earlier,the ECR had talkedabout the goal of providing every citizen with a balanced diet, without specifying what a balanceddiet mightmean.It appearsthatthe concept of diet was changing in the 1960s, mainly on account of changes that were occurringin the cultureof farming.Escobar (1995) has cited nutritionand balanceddiet as important items of the post-wardiscourse of internationaldevelopment agencies, the WorldBank, and USAID. Lackof scientific knowledge about nutritionalrequirements of the humanbody was projectedas a major cultural deficiency responsible for poor socio-economic developmentin thirdworld societies. A vast batteryof adult education schooltextbooks,extensionservices primers, and media programmes was pressed into service in orderto tell people whatthey must do to make their diet balanced. Inevitably, the exhortationrevolved aroundthe need to include eggs, meat and milk so thatthe diet would have enough protein. Conspicuous

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by its absence was the mention of pulses, and we can guess why. Even as the new, scientific 'knowledge' of balanced diet was spreading, the most important source of balance in the Indian diet was diminishing underthe auspices of the green revolution. Bardhanhas pointed out that in the postgreen revolution period the "productionof pulses, a major source of protein for the poor, has largely been stagnant"(1984: 11). Between the early 1960s andthe early 1970s the area under pulse cultivation declined by two and a half million acres, resultingin a drop in the per capita availability of pulses.9To fully grasp the meaning of this phenomenon, we need to recognise that pulses facilitate the absorption of cereal protein by providing amino acids which complementthe ones found in cereals such as wheat and rice. It is the combinationthat makesthe proteinavailablein a cereal-pulse diet balanced. Lappe and Collins (1978) have called it 'usable' protein and have treatedit as anindex of the qualityof protein. They say: displaceslegumes Thus,if greenrevolution in the traditionaldiet, not only does the overall protein intake fall, since legumes have two or four times the proteincontent of grain, but just as critical, the balanced combinationof grains and legumes that improvesthe biologicalusabilityof protein is also undercut(1978: 153). From this perspective, we have not even begun to perceive the nutritionalimpact of the agricultural modernisation strategy associated with the green revolution. The reason why this strategy proved so detrimental to pulse production was at least initially the simple fact of farmers being coaxed to devote their best lands to highyielding varieties of wheat and cash crops. Withtheincreaseof canalirrigation,seepage made a great number of pulse producing areas unfit for this purpose.
CONCLUSION

The EC had talked about a "larger way of life and a wider variety of choices" (p 33) as a major promise of modernisation. The changes brought about in people's dietaryoptions- we have examinedjust one outof many- by thegreenrevolutionstrategy modernisationcan be seen in of agricultural that manner too, and the nutritional implicationsof these changes can be ignored ortreatedin a simplisticmanner.Thatwould be in keeping with the style of analysis customarily applied to India's agricultural modernisationin the context of the use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and hybrid seeds which depend on them and on heavy Barringexceptions,'0agricultural irrigation. economists have treated an increase in fertiliser use per acre, for example, as an indicatorof progress, completely ignoring

the impact of fertiliser-drivenproductivity on the naturalfertility of the soil. Nadkarni ( 1991) has noted the recenttrendof decline in the rateat which productivityof land had increasedin the early phase of the intensive use of chemical fertilisers.It is a disturbing fact that economists have generally failed to show an interestin such obvious aspects of agricultural and economic growth as depletion of the physical environment,the misery caused by displacementof massive numbers of people due to large-scale irrigationschemes involving big dams and canal works, and migrationto metropolitan slums as a result of pauperisation. Given the narrowlimits within which the modernisation processof India'sagricultural has been examined, it is hardly surprising that its impact on children's lives has not been a subjectof discussionor debate." This paperhas made an attemptto show how the espousal of the EC's wholesale modernisation package involved the jettisoning of basic education in favour of a return to general, academic elementary education. It can be arguedthatthe EC was advocatinga new type of generalelementary education for ruralchildren, not a returnto the old colonial mode which basic education had startedto erode. It can also be argued that EC's modernist vision of an activitychildren centredacademiceducationforrural did not materialise because of inadequate funds and the lack of political will. A commitmentto educationaldevelopmentby the state and central governments was one of the assumptionsmadeby the EC; a stable political environment was another major assumption.'2If these assumptions proved false, we can hardlyblame history for that; rather,we must ask if the purely normative discourse of educational planning, which the EC exemplified in such perfection, is a for valid preparation change. In the absence of a realistic estimate of what could be expected in the emerging socio-economic and political scenario in the mid-1960s, the generaland academicelementaryeducation programme recommended by the EC in place of basic education certainly proved detrimental to the spread of education in ruralIndia. The persistenceof a high dropout rate,with almost no change in over three decades which have passed since the submission of EC, is a proof of this conclusion,althoughits detailedverification must wait for furtherresearch.

Vol andaid' (Economicand Political Weekly, 2, No 50, 1967, pp 2209-1 1), the total PL480 assistance to India up to March 1966 amountedto morethanone-thirdof themoney supply with the public as a whole in India. 4 For a discussion providing a historical overview on post-independence Indian economy, see Kurien (1992). 5 The reference is to the agrarian reforms attemptedunderLazaroCardenaswhich were followed by a counter-revolutionof sorts in the 1940s with the arrivalof Americanagroresearch enterprise backing American agrobusiness. 6 An elaborate account is available in Frankel (1978). 7 G K Arora provide a counter-view in his review in The Book Review, August 1995. 8 The only official committeeto expressanxiety about primary teachers' housing in postindependenceeducational history was set up some time in the 1950s. Its deliberationsare documented in Report on Primary Junior Building (National Basic Schools Ministryof WorksandHousing, Organisation, New Delhi; undated). 9 See Lappe and Collins (1978). 10 Three exceptions are Narindar Singh (Economics and the Crisis of Survival,OUP, New Delhi, 1976;andTheKeynesianFallout, (I1991), Sage, New Delhi, 1996),M V Nadkarni and H M Desarda (see his 'Towards an AlternativeVision'. paperpresentedat Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad,in a seminar on agricultural developmental perspectives, June 13-15, 1996.) 11 For an early attempt,see my Raj, Samajaur Shiksha (1978; rev ed Rajkamal,New Delhi, 1991). 12 Adiseshiah enumerates these and other assumptions in his foreword to Naik (1982).

References
Bardhan,Pranab(1984): The Political Economy of Development in India, OUP, New Delhi. Baxi, U and B Parekh( 1995): Crisis and Change in ContemporaryIndia, Sage, New Delhi. Ehrlich, Paul R (1978): 'Preface' in Robert van den Bosch, The Pesticide Conspiracy, Doubleday, Dorset, US. Escobar, Arturo (1995): Encountering Development, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Frankel, Francine R (1978): India's Political Economy, 1947-77, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Kurien, C T (1992): The Economy, Sage, New Delhi. Lappe,FrancesMooreandJosephCollins ( 1978): Food First, Ballantine, New York. Mehta, Balraj(I1973):Crisis of IndianEconomy, Sterling, New Delhi. Myrdal,Gunnar(I1970):The Challenge of World Poverty, New York. M Nadkarni, V (1991): 'EconomicsandEcological Concern' in Economny, Society and and Development,C T Kurien,E R Prabhakar S Gopal (eds), Sage, New Delhi, pp 140-55. Naik, J P (1982): Education Co,hmission and After, Allied, New Delhi. AmericabyDesign, OUP, Noble, David F (I1977): Oxford. Rajkamal, Shukla, Srilal ( 1968): Raacg Daxrbalri, New Delhi.

Notes
I See Frankel(1978) for a detailed discussion. 2 For reports on student agitations, see Economic and Political Weekly, August 27, October 8 and October 15, 1966. For an editorial comment, see the issue of October 1, 1966. 3 According to K N Sharma's 'Self-reliance

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