Growth With Equity: The New Technology and Agrarian Change in Bengal

During the last two decades some parts of West Bengal and Bangladesh have had an unprecedented growth in agriculture due to the expansion of irrigation facilities and an extensive use of high yielding variety seeds, fertilisers and pesticides. These area are known as the ‘green revolution’ belts of Bengal. The introduction of new technology and enterprising skills of farmers have helped agricultural growth in Bengal but the fruits of this development have not reached the poor in Bangladesh as they have in West Bengal. This then raises an important question how did West Bengal achieve growth with equity? This book highlights the role of different factors such as state intervention, changes in power structure, unionization of peasantry in achieving growth with equity. The problems of agrarian change have been discussed with the help of district and village-level data. Fieldwork for this study was carried out in the Nadia district of West Bengal and Kushtia district of Bangladesh.