Indian Agriculture

Our argument in this book is that India started its develop-ment efforts in the post-independence period with a more or less correct approach towards the problem of technological choice in agriculture, based on a balanced assessment of the requirements of growth and equity; however, in the following decades, the technology policy changed to incorporate more and more inappropriate techniques of production. It will be seen that even though Indian agriculture is pre-eminently private, consisting of hundreds of millions of individual cultivators, government policy has had a decisive role in shaping the technological basis of Indian agriculture. This policy has been, to a very large extent, a direct result of western influence, especially that of the united states.