![]() ![]() This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology-artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds-but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). ![]() He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive-they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. “But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. ![]()
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