Like North America and Russia, the subcontinent had numerous large rivers. Damming and taming these rivers would kill three birds with one stone; generating electricity, providing water for irrigation and preventing flooding. After a particularly lethal bout of flooding on the Godavari in the monsoon of 1953, a leading engineer wrote to a leading politician that this was a river
with enormous potential for good. The destruction caused by floods of this year has, however, demonstrated that if these flood waters are not harnessed for beneficial use, they will constitute a potential threat to the well-being of the people. Properly conserved, these flood waters will satisfy all the needs of the Godavari basin and leave ample reserves, which integrated with the Krishna waters will enable irrigation and power benefits to be extended right down to Madras and further south . . . No effort should therefore be spared in harnessing of the Godavari waters, in optimum integration with the Krishna, nor extraneous reasons permitted to delay or jeopardise their consummation.36
Here was a proselytizing technocrat speaking to the already converted. For while the Godavari was still undammed, most of the other major rivers had already come under the hand of man. Among the massive dam projects under way were those on the Mahanadi, Rihand, Tungabhadra, Damodar and Sutlej rivers.
In the mid-1950s the political scientist Henry Hart wrote a lyrical account of the transformation of ‘New India’s Rivers’. For Hart, these projects were ‘the greatest of the monuments of free India’; to them ‘men and women come, in a pilgrimage growing season by season, to see for themselves the dams and canals and power stations’.
In the book, there is a particularly fine description of the construction of the Tungabhadra dam. When finished, the dam would embody 32 million cubic feet of masonry; these laid at the rate of 40,000 cubic feet a day, every day for five years. The sheer scale could properly be conveyed only by means of analogy. ‘Imagine the masonry in Tungabhadra Dam’, wrote Hart, ‘being laid as a highway, 20 feet wide, 6 inches thick. It would extend from Lucknow to Calcutta, or from Bombay to Madras.’37
Without question the most prestigious of all these schemes was the Bhakra–Nangal project in northern India. Again, its scale is best narrated in numbers. At 680 feet, the Bhakra dam was the second highest in the world; only the Grand Coulee Dam, on the Colorado river, was higher. The concrete and masonry that would finally go into it was estimated at 500 million cubic feet, ‘more than twice the cubic contents of the seven great pyramids of Egypt’. The project would generate nearly a million kilowatts of electricity, while the water from the reservoir would irrigate 7.4 million acres of land, this carried in canals for whose excavation 30 million cubic yards of mud and stone had to be removed.38
This project was a form of compensation for the refugee farmers from West Punjab, a substitute for the canal colonies they had left behind on the other side of the border. These peasants, predominantly Sikh, had ‘a martyr-like yearning to recreate within their own lifetimes the prosperity of which they have been cruelly deprived’. Bhakra–Nangal gave them ‘the field and the resources from which they can rebuild and resettle themselves’. In fact, it gave them more – for in addition to the water there was power, from which the Punjabis could, if they so chose, for the first time build an industrial future for themselves.
The Bhakra–Nangal project was described in minute detail in a special issue of the Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development. The issue opened with a set of four most revealing photographs. The first showed the densely wooded site before work began – it carried the caption, ‘River Sutlej at Bhakra in its primeval splendour – the site as it was’. The second showed crane-like structures in the water and a low bridge slung across the gorge: this was ‘Exploratory drilling in river bed with drills mounted on pontoons – the first invasion’. The third photo, taken apparently in the dry season, showed hillsides by now quite bare, with trucks and bulldozers on the river bed. Thus ‘Concreting of the Dam begins – man lays the foundation for changing nature’. In the last photo, the dam had begun to rise, aided by machines of a shape and size never before seen in India. This was ‘Excavation with heavy machines in progress in pit-area – the struggle with nature’.39
The men and women who worked at Bhakra were all Indian, with one exception. This was an American, Harvey Slocum. Slocum had little formal education; starting out as a labourer in a steel mill, he had risen to the position of construction superintendent on the Grand Coulee dam. Slocum joined the Bhakra team as chief engineer in 1952 and imprinted upon it his own distinctive style of working. Officers and workers of all levels were mandated to dress uniformly. Slocum himself was at the site at 8 a.m. sharp, staying there until late evening. A stern disciplinarian, he could not abide the sloth and inefficiency that was rampant around him. Once, when the telephone system broke down, he wrote to the prime minister informing him that ‘only God, not Slocum, could build the Bhakra Dam on schedule’.40
In the first week of July 1954 Nehru visited Bhakra to formally inaugurate the project. As he flicked on the switch of the power house, Dakotas of the Indian air force dipped their wings overhead. Next he opened the sluice gates of the dam. Seeing the water coming towards them, the villagers downstream set off hundreds of home-made crackers. As one eyewitness wrote, ‘For 150 miles the boisterous celebration spread like a chain reaction along the great canal and the branches and distributaries to the edges of the Rajasthan Desert, long before the water got there.’41
V
In the push to industrialize India, a key role had to be played by technology and technologists. Since his days as a student at Cambridge, Jawaharlal Nehru had been fascinated by modern science. ‘Science is the spirit of the age and the dominating factor of the modern world’, he wrote. Nehru wished that what he called ‘the scientific temper’ should inform all spheres of human activity, including politics. More specifically, in an underdeveloped country like India, science must be made the handmaiden of economic progress, with scientists devoting their work to augmenting productivity and ending poverty.42
At the time of Indian independence a mere 0.1 per cent of GNP was spent on scientific research. Within a decade the figure had jumped to 0.5 per cent; later, it was to exceed 1 per cent. Under Nehru’s active direction, a chain of new research laboratories was set up. These, following the French model, were established independently, outside of the existing universities. Within the ambit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research were some two dozen individual institutes. There was a strong utilitarian agenda at work, with scientists in these laboratories encouraged to develop new products for Indians rather than publish academic papers in foreign journals.43
An Indian scientist whom Nehru patronized early and consistently was the brilliant Cambridge-educated physicist Homi Bhabha. Bhabha founded and directed two major scientific institutions. The first was the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay whose work, as its name implies, was aimed mostly at basic research. It had world-class departments of physics and mathematics and also, in time, housed India’s first mainframe computer. The second was the Atomic Energy Commission, mandated to build and run India’s nuclear power plants. This was handsomely funded by the government with an annual budget, in 1964, of about Rs100 million.44
Many new engineering schools were also started. These included the flagship Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), five of which were inaugurated between 1954 and 1964. Like the new laboratories, the new colleges were intended to augment indigenous technical capability. Both Nehru and Bhabha were determined to lessen India’s dependence on the West for scientific materials and know-how. They believed that ‘if an item of equipment was imported from abroad, all one got was that particular instrument. But if one built it oneself, an all-important lesson in expertise was learnt as well’.45
VI
The industrial bias of Indian planning was tempered by a range of programmes promoting agrarian uplift. On the morning of 2 October 1952 (Mahatma Gandhi�
�s birthday), the president of India inaugurated a nationwide series of community development programmes with a broadcast over the radio. Fifty-five projects were launched across India that day, these funded jointly by the governments of India and the United States. Among the schemes to be promoted by community development were roads and wells, cattle welfare and improved methods of cultivation.
The projects were launched by ministers, chief ministers, and commissioners. These dignitaries helped remove earth for building roads and laid foundation stones for schools and hospitals. In Alipur village, twelve miles out of Delhi on the road to Karnal, Jawaharlal Nehru dug into the earth to help prepare a road. ‘With verve and vigour he plunged into the work, having taken his jacket off.’ His companion, the American ambassador, also carried some baskets of earth. Not everyone was as agile as these two. When a well-dressed official attempted to emulate the prime minister the villagers shouted ‘Sar par! Sar par!’ – meaning, ‘Carry the baskets on your head, you fool, not with your hands!’ Speaking to the villagers, Nehru said that community development would bring about a rural revolution by peaceful means, not, as in other places, by the breaking of heads.46
How did these schemes work in practice? Two years after they began, the anthropologist S. C. Dube studied a community development project in western Uttar Pradesh. He looked at the project from the viewpoint of the village-level worker (VLW), the government functionary mandated with taking new ideas to the peasants.
By Dube’s account, these ‘agents of change’ certainly had energy and enterprise. They got up at the crack of dawn, and worked all day. Among their duties were the demonstration to the villagers of the merits of new seeds and chemical fertilizers. These were tried on sample plots, the peasants looking on as the VLW explained scientific methods of dibbling. Different crops were sown, and different combinations of fertilizers used. The VLW also offered the villagers free angrezi khad (English manure) for use on their fields.
It appears that the peasants of the UP were somewhat ambivalent about the new techniques. Here is a conversation between the VLW and a farmer known only by his initials, ‘MS’:
VLW:
What do you think of the new seed?
MS:
What can I think? If the government thinks it is good, it must be good.
VLW:
Do you think it is better than the local variety?
MS:
Yes. It resists disease much better. It can stand frost and rain, and there is more demand for it in the market.
VLW:
What about yield?
MS:
I cannot say. Some people say it is more, others say it is not.
VLW:
Some people say it is not as good in taste.
MS:
They are right. It is not half as good. If the roti [bread] is served hot it is more or less the same, but if we keep it for an hour or so it gets as tough as hide. No, it is not as good in taste. People say that we all get very weak if we eat this wheat.
VLW:
What is your experience?
MS:
Many more people suffer from digestive disorders these days. Our children have coughs and colds. Perhaps it is because of the new seed and sugar cane. It may be that the air has been spoilt by the wars.
VLW:
And what about the new fertilizer?
MS:
They increase the yield; there is no doubt about it. But they probably destroy the vitality of the land and also of the grain.47
Indian peasants had mixed feelings about the new seeds and fertilizers. But they unambiguously welcomed fresh supplies of water. At the same time as S. C. Dube was studying community development in the UP, the British anthropologist Scarlett Epstein was living in Wangala, a village in southern Mysore lately the beneficiary of canal irrigation. Till the water came, this was like any other hamlet in the interior Deccan, growing millet for its own consumption. With irrigation came new crops such as paddy and sugar cane. These were sold outside the village for a handsome return. Paddy gave a profit after expenses of Rs136 per acre; sugar cane as much as Rs 980 per acre. These changes in local economics fostered changes in lifestyle as well. Before the canals arrived, the residents of Wangala wore scruffy clothes and rarely ventured outside the village. But ‘Wangala men now wear shirts and a number also wear dhotis; their wives wear colourful saris bought with money and they all spend lavishly on weddings. Wangala men pay frequent visits to Mandya [town], where they visit coffee shops and toddy shops; rice has replaced ragi as their staple diet.’
These and other changes were made possible only by the extension of irrigation. As Epstein found, the coming of canal water was the turning point in the history of the village. Events of note, such as weddings, deaths and murders, were dated by whether they happened before or after irrigation.48
VII
Assured irrigation and chemical fertilizers increased agricultural productivity. But they could not solve what was a fundamental problem of rural India: inequality in access to land. Therefore, landless peasants were encouraged to settle in areas not previously under the plough. In the first decade of Independence, close to half a million hectares of land were colonized, principally from malarial forests in the northern Terai, the central Indian hills, and the Western Ghats. Previously these areas had been inhabited only by tribes genetically resistant to malaria. With the invention of DDT it became possible for the state to clear the forests. These lands were naturally fertile, rich in calcium and potassium and organic matter (if poor in phosphates). In any case, there was no shortage of peasants who wanted them.49
A second way of tackling landlessness was to persuade large landholders to voluntarily give up land under their possession. This was a method pioneered by a leading disciple of Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave. In 1951 Bhave undertook a walking tour through the then communist-dominated areas of Telengana. In Pochempelli village, he persuaded a zamindar named Ramchandra Reddi to donate a hundred acres of land. This encouraged Bhave to make this a countrywide campaign, known as the ‘Bhoodan’ movement. The saint trudged through the Indian heartland, giving speeches wherever he went. He must have walked perhaps 50,000 miles, while collecting in excess of 4 million acres. At first his mission was reckoned a success – like community development, a noble Gandhian alternative to violent revolution. But later assessments were less charitable. Like some other saints, Bhave preferred the grand gesture over humdrum detail. Critics pointed out that the bulk of the land donated to Bhave had never been distributed to the landless; over the years it had slowly returned to the hands of the original owners. Besides, much of the land that stayed under Bhoodan was rocky and sandy, unfit for cultivation. In few places were the intended beneficiaries organized to work the land they had been gifted. On balance, the Bhoodan movement must be reckoned a failure, albeit a spectacular one.50
Table 10.2 – Access to land in India, 1953 –1960
Size class
Percentage of holdings
Percentage of total area
(in hectares)
1953 – 4
1959 – 60
1953 – 4
1959 – 60
less than 1
56.15
40.70
5.58
6.71
1 to 2
15.08
22.26
10.02
12.17
2 to 4
14.19
18.85
18.56
19.95
4 to 10
10.36
13.45
29.22
30.47
more than 10
4.22
4.74
36.62
30.70
SOURCE: Nripen Bandyopadhyaya, ‘The Story of Land Reforms in Indian Planning’, in Amiya Kumar Bagchi, ed., Economy, Society and Polity: Essays in the Political Economy of Indian Planning in Honour of Professor Bhabatosh Datta (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1988)
A third way of ending landlessness was to use the arm of the state. Land reform legislation had long been on the agenda of the Congress. After Independence, the different states passed legislation abolishing the zamindari system which, under the British, had bestowed effective rights of ownership to absentee landlords. The abolition of zamindari freed up large areas of land for redistribution, while also freeing tenants from cesses and rents previously exacted from them.
After the end of zamindari, the state vested rights of ownership in their tenants. These, typically, came from the intermediate castes. Left unaffected were those at the bottom of the heap, such as low-caste labourers and sharecroppers. Their well-being would have required a second stage of land reforms, where ceilings would be placed on holdings, and excess land handed over to the landless. This was a task that the government was unable or unwilling to undertake.51
Even after a decade of planning, access to land remained very unequal. Table 10.2 indicates the percentages in five size classes of both the absolute number of holdings and the combined operational area of those holdings.
If we define those who own less than four hectares as ‘small and marginal’ farmers, and those who own more than four hectares as ‘medium and large farmers’, then Table 10.2 can be compressed into Table 10.3. This reveals a slight diminution in inequality, with a 3.6 per cent drop in the numbers of small/marginal farmers and a 4.6 per cent increase in the land held by them. The operative word is ‘slight’; so slight as to be almost imperceptible, and, in a democracy committed to the ‘socialistic pattern of society’, simply unacceptable.
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 29