Merchants and Mechanics

Based on Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy 1947-2004: The Gradual Revolution (Oxford, 2005), and Arvind Panagariya, The Nehru-Era Economic History and Thought (Oxford, 2024)

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The Third Plan, already in a shambles at the time of Nehru’s death, ended badly. The total increase in GDP per capita between 1961 and 1966 was one-half of one percent.¹ The share of manufacturing in GDP declined slightly between the same two years, while the value of agricultural output declined absolutely.²

Lal Bahadur Shastri, India’s second prime minister, died after only nineteen months in office. He was a lifelong socialist. He left intact almost all of the apparatus that regulated industry, but deeply troubled by India’s inability to feed its people, he abandoned Nehru’s social engineering approach to agriculture. His minister of agriculture, Chidambaram Subramaniam, initiated India’s Green Revolution.

Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, was India’s third prime minister.³ Between January 1966 when she first assumed the office, and October 1984 when she was assassinated, she held the office for almost sixteen years. These years were politically turbulent, and Gandhi’s embrace of socialism is widely believed to have been a political tactic rather than a deeply felt commitment. India stagnated under her government.

The Green Revolution

The goal of Nehru’s agricultural policies had been to raise the welfare of the poorest rural households through gradual institutional change at the village level. Policies that made rural incomes less equal were to be avoided, and most policies that immediately increased agricultural production fell into this category.

There was no mystery as to what policies would raise production. A World Bank Mission visited India during Shastri’s time as prime minister. It came to these conclusions:

It would be much more efficient to focus on the individual farmer rather than the village as the decision-making focus of agricultural policy. Indeed, the Mission’s experts argued that within the existing constraints of technical knowledge, land tenure and farm size, it was possible to achieve substantial increases in agricultural production by providing price and cost incentives to individual farmers for higher private investment on modem inputs. The major components of the new approach urged on the Indian government were a reorientation of overall investment priorities toward agriculture; incentive prices at levels high enough to guarantee profitability to individual farmers using the most advanced techniques; and the concentration of modem inputs, especially pure seeds, pesticides, power, implements, and above all, fertilizers, in areas with assured water from irrigation.⁴

The Bank’s experts had little illusion that their recommendations for achieving rapid agricultural growth were reconcilable, at least in the short term, with the aim of reducing disparities. Apart from the obvious consequences of aggravating inequalities between irrigated and rain-fed areas, there was also the recognition that initial adoption trials with fertilizer were made for the most part by owner-cultivators with larger size holdings of 8 to 25 acres. Only such farmers, by virtue of their superior economic standing, education, and social status at the top of the village hierarchy could afford to take the economic and social risks of innovation…

The economic assets of the individual farmer became a primary consideration for an additional reason. Major irrigation schemes, constructed to provide drought protection over maximum areas, generally could not supply the higher water levels per acre necessary for the most efficient use of modem inputs, especially chemical fertilizer. On the whole, the new technology required supplementary water from a tube well. Accordingly, the Mission leaned toward the view that in many areas the best result would come from encouraging private investment in tube wells, where the nature of the water resources permitted this.⁵

These recommendations aligned with Shastri’s own instincts and those of his minister of agriculture, C. Subramaniam. One of their decisions was to introduce new seed varieties.

The most important varieties were the product of a cross-breeding program undertaken by Norman Borlaug and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. Borlaug championed the idea of developing foodgrain varieties that were “widely adaptable” — that would have high yields under a wide range of light and temperature conditions.

Through a series of incidental connections and rediscoveries in the 1950s and 1960s, Borlaug found that spring wheat varieties derived from Colombian and Mexican varieties had consistently high yields in widely dispersed trials. At that time, most agricultural scientists were skeptical that one variety could have consistent high performance over a variety of locations. Borlaug’s international trials showed that a widely adapted variety could even outyield popular national varieties in their home countries. In just a few years, Borlaug took an unpopular idea and completely changed the paradigm of plant adaptation.⁶

Borlaug cross-bred these varieties of spring wheat to further increase their yield. He extended his research to rice and maize, but wheat remained his principal focus.

The expectation was that a widely adaptable variety would immediately increase yields when planted in a “target” country like India, and that cross-breeding it with native varieties would bring out traits that were locally important, further increasing the yield. The execution of this strategy became known as the “green revolution.”

Borlaug’s research required certain choices to be made. One decision was that very high doses of fertilizer would be applied to the trial plants, leading to the selection of varieties that not only accepted heavy fertilization but thrived on it. Borlaug justified this decision by arguing that the “target” countries were forced by their low agricultural productivity to use land intensively, which would quickly lead to nutrient exhaustion. Fertilization wouldn’t be an option for them; it would be a necessity. Another decision was that the trial plants would receive appropriate volumes of water at appropriate times in their growth cycle. These conditions could only be replicated in irrigated fields, and perhaps not even then — irrigation can’t stop a deluge of monsoon rain from falling. The varieties that Borlaug selected would be adaptable to a range of light and temperature environments, but not to a range of farming practices.

Supporting the introduction of these wheat varieties meant abandoning Nehru’s equity criterion. Two-thirds of India’s wheat-growing land did not have the requisite irrigation.⁷ The remaining third of the land often required supplementary irrigation in the form of tube wells,⁸ and fertilizer and pesticides would have to be purchased. Only the affluent farmers would be able to bear these expenses. Promoting the new varieties would be a case of “betting on the strong” and allowing the weak to fall behind.

The Indian government agreed to the introduction of widely adaptable wheat in 1965. The seeds were to be “planted on well-irrigated land, applying from 100 to 150 pounds of fertilizer per acre as compared with a national average of 3 to 5 pounds per acre.”⁹ The government also set a price floor for wheat, to ensure that fertilizer and pesticide applications would be profitable, and took steps to expand the availability of fertilizer.

The new policy was a success: by 1969, wheat production had risen by more than two-thirds.¹⁰ It is not clear how much of these gains should be attributed to Borlaug’s new varieties. They were introduced as part of a package that included supplementary irrigation, heavy fertilization, and pesticides. These three technologies had not been widely used earlier. Nehru’s policy had been to spread support for them thinly but widely, in keeping with his equality criterion. Weak support had led to weak take-up. Also, Nehru had tried to keep down the price of wheat to make it affordable for the poor, but a low price made these technologies unprofitable. The unanswered question is, if these same technologies had been applied as vigorously to native varieties of wheat, what would have been the increase in yield?

The green revolution marked the transition from a subsistence-farming past to an industrial farming future. The figure below shows that wheat yields were stagnant through the early and mid 1960s, then rose sharply as the high-yield wheat / technology package was introduced. Yields grew steadily for a period of thirty years as the industrial approach to farming took hold.

India’s green revolution was confined almost entirely to wheat. High-yield varieties of rice that had been developed in Taiwan were introduced, but they did not grow well in an environment dominated by the monsoon rains. The distribution of land also did not favour the new varieties.

Experience showed that except in areas where landholdings were consolidated and were two or three times the size of the national average — conditions that existed in the “green revolution” wheat areas — “large” landowners, like small and marginal farmers, found it uneconomic to invest in modem agricultural techniques. Their holdings, separated into two, three, and four-acre parcels and scattered within and between villages, were usually less than the optimum area required for the efficient cultivation of the high-yielding varieties. This was a pervasive problem in the irrigated paddy areas where the installation of minor irrigation works became necessary to supplement inadequate and/or uncertain supplies of water from surface irrigation projects, but the command area of the smallest percolation wells or tube wells was a minimum of five to ten acres. It was, moreover, financially impossible for even large landowners to duplicate such facilities…on several scattered holdings. But without assured water, cultivators would not make the increased outlays for modern inputs, especially the higher dosages of fertilizer required by the high-yielding varieties, when the investment was likely to be lost if rains were inadequate.¹¹

Rice yields are shown in the figure above. The effects of the 1965 and 1966 droughts are clearly evident. The failure of the first generation of high-yield varieties is also evident: yields remain flat until the late 1970s. But in rice, too, the shift from subsistence farming to industrial farming took hold, leading to steadily rising yields.

Betting on the strong meant that the strong got richer.

Large farmers began a process of capital accumulation that allowed them to pyramid their gains. Profits earned from the introduction of high-yielding varieties were used to buy more land, improve land already under cultivation, purchase modem equipment for mechanization of farm operations that allowed double and triple cropping, and diversification of cropping patterns to include more profitable commercial crops.¹²

The weak — the farmers having small or fragmented landholdings or no land at all, or lacking adequate irrigation — gained little from the green revolution. Almost half of the rural population continued to live in poverty.¹³

Politics and Policy

Shastri was ready to abandon Nehru’s agricultural policy because he was dismayed by India’s inability to feed its people, but external pressure pushed him in the same direction. The expenditures of the Third Plan were financed through a combination of domestic revenue, bond issues, and foreign aid. The aid amounted to US$ 1 billion per year, and India would need even more aid — about US$ 1.6 billion per year, more than 2% of its GDP — in the immediate future.¹⁴ The World Bank and the American government, both major donors, were concerned by the failure of India’s economic development policies. They made changes in these policies a precondition for further aid; principally, they wanted India to adopt policies that would quickly increase agricultural productivity.

The donors’ concerns were not limited to agriculture. The World Bank Mission was also critical of India’s industrial policies.

The Mission acknowledged that the new agricultural policy was competitive with a program of industrial expansion in the public sector, requiring not only a much larger share of domestic investment, but foreign exchange for the import of modem inputs, especially chemical fertilizer. It therefore combined its recommendations on agriculture with renewed emphasis on the necessity of greater efforts by government to attract higher levels of domestic and foreign private investment in industry. The package of policies recommended included proposals for relaxation of controls on industrial licensing; and an import liberalization program to stimulate investment in priority industries. As part of the strategy for strengthening price incentives in the promotion of export-oriented industries, moreover, the mission made its first recommendation for the devaluation of the rupee. Attributing India’s chronic trade imbalance to an overvalued exchange rate that reduced the competitiveness of exports in foreign markets, the Mission argued that devaluation, supported by relaxation of industrial licensing controls and import liberalization, would work to stimulate investment in the more profitable export sector by freeing the market mechanism to operate efficiently in allocating scarce resources.¹⁵

As anticipated by the World Bank, the new agricultural policy forced Shastri’s government to allocate more spending and more foreign exchange to agriculture. Its support for industry was correspondingly smaller. The government attempted to replace public investment with private investment by introducing some market incentives and some regulatory reforms, but Panagariya does not believe that these changes constituted a significant change in policy.¹⁶ A maze of restrictions imposed on industry under Nehru remained in place.

The devaluation of the rupee was handled by Shastri’s successor, Indira Gandhi. The rupee was overvalued: the foreign currency price of domestic goods was too high, hampering exports, and the rupee price of foreign goods was too low, undermining domestic producers of importable goods. A sizable devaluation would make India’s goods more competitive on world markets and encourage import substitution. It would also allow India to scale back the complex scheme of export subsidies, tariffs, and import quotas with which the government had tried to mitigate the effects of overvaluation. Gandhi devalued the rupee by about one-third in June 1966.

The devaluation was condemned by senior members of the Congress party and by both left- and right-wing opposition parties. They were angry that India’s policy was being dictated by outsiders — specifically, by the IMF. India needed loans to deal with the reserve losses caused by its overvalued currency. The IMF was willing to provide the loans, but insisted that India deal with the source of the problem by devaluing the rupee. Gandhi, having no viable alternative, agreed to this condition.

Gandhi’s critics did not believe that devaluation would help the Indian economy. Most of India’s exports were agricultural goods whose prices were determined by world markets. The critics argued that devaluation would reduce the rupee price of these exports without significantly expanding the level of exports, leaving exporters worse off. It would also raise the prices of imported raw materials and capital goods, making Indian businesses less profitable. In essence, they believed that the devaluation would not significantly alter the pattern of trade, leaving only harmful domestic price changes in its wake.

If both export expansion and import substitution are ruled out, what new source of demand could drive India’s industrialization? It could only be the consumer demands of India’s own increasingly prosperous population. But on average, Indians weren’t becoming prosperous, and for the half of the rural population with no land or little land or fragmented land, there was no practical policy that could make them prosperous.

Senior members of Congress had engineered Gandhi’s appointment as prime minister for two reasons. First, they had wanted a collective style of leadership in which the states’ chief ministers could influence national policy, and Gandhi had been believed to be pliable. They were blindsided by Gandhi’s decision to devalue the rupee — early evidence that this belief was mistaken. Second, they had believed that the affection that Indians felt for her father would transfer to her, ensuring another Congress victory in the general elections of 1967.

These elections occurred during a period of social unrest stemming from “food shortages, rising prices, and increasing income disparities”:

Illegal strikes for higher salaries and dearness allowances were called by government employees ranging the gamut of doctors, teachers, engineers, and junior-grade civil servants. Trade union leaders…launched lightning strikes for higher wages that tied up industries and services in large parts of the country. Students…vented their resentment in burning and looting of shops, buses, post offices, railway equipment, and the destruction of college buildings and laboratories. Potential for violent protest was also evident in the countryside, especially in regions where communist agitators were actively organizing among the peasantry. In West Bengal, the Communist parties took the lead in organizing mob attacks on district procurement offices, rice mills, and markets, which expanded to destruction of railway stations, banks, telephone and telegraph equipment.¹⁷

The social unrest was accompanied by a political realignment. Congress occupied a shrinking political center, hemmed in by both left-wing and right-wing parties.

Congress contested the 1967 general elections on Gandhi’s celebrity and renewed promises of socialism. The party was returned to power with a reduced majority at the national level, but lost power or lost majorities in some states. Congress was divided as to how it should respond to the electoral setback, and was soon engulfed in a power struggle.

The conflict had two separate but ultimately intertwining strands. The prime minister and the senior leaders of the Congress party organization — known collectively as the Syndicate — were engaged in an embittered battle for preeminence in the conduct of governmental affairs. At the same time, the older party bosses — some of whom belonged to the Syndicate — were caught up in a confrontation with a younger group of socialist radicals determined to wrest control of the organization from their hands and shape it into an effective instrument of reform. The intersection of these two factional battles, in which the radicals offered support to Mrs. Gandhi and she accepted their help after it became evident that the Syndicate was preparing to replace her as prime minister, led directly to the split of the Congress party in 1969. It also transformed the nature of Indian politics. The split was subsequently justified solely as an ideological conflict between those with a vested interest in the status quo and those committed to socialist change. As a result, even the appearance of political consensus that had established the Congress as a party of national unity was shattered. Political rhetoric emphasizing slogans of class struggle replaced the pragmatic language of accommodation. Compromise, once lauded as the expression of India’s national genius in political life, was denounced as nothing more than collusion with the vested interests.¹⁸

The split came in November 1969. Congress divided itself into Congress (R), led by Gandhi, and Congress (O), representing the Syndicate and its backers. Congress (R) did not hold a majority of the seats in parliament, but Gandhi remained in power with the support of left-wing parties (including both communist parties). Congress (R) won a majority of the seats in the 1971 general elections, in which Gandhi campaigned on the slogan, “Remove poverty.”

Gandhi had initially continued the mildly liberalizing policies favoured by the Syndicate. In 1966, 42 industries were exempted from the licensing provisions of the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act of 1951. Regulations governing the introduction of new products at existing facilities were relaxed, as were regulations governing production increases.¹⁹

Gandhi reversed course in 1967, positioning herself as a socialist. There is little evidence that she shared her father’s idealism; instead, her socialism was “pragmatic, a means of distinguishing herself from the Congress old guard.”²⁰ Lacking their support, she would align herself with Congress’s passionate young socialists.

In July 1969, in defiance of the Syndicate, Gandhi nationalized fourteen of India’s largest banks. She nationalized the insurance industry in 1971 and the coal and oil industries in 1973. The licensing exemptions announced in 1966 were withdrawn in 1970. Measures were taken to limit the growth and influence of the largest businesses. The Monopolies and Trade Practices Act of 1969 allowed the government to regulate approximately 1200 large firms. These firms would be “subject to additional licensing restrictions, including confinement of all new investments to a narrow set of highly capital-intensive industries.”²¹ The Foreign Exchange Regulations Act of 1973 placed additional restrictions on foreign exchange transactions and on foreign ownership of firms domiciled in India.

Implicit in this legislation was the socialist notion that the poor benefit when restraints are placed on the entrepreneurial class. The entrepreneurs did not see it that way. They claimed that the government’s policies led to “fear, uncertainty, and discouragement of growth,” and warned that investment would stagnate until these policies were changed.²²

The striking thing about Gandhi’s legislation is how little of it was aimed at directly assisting the poor. The problem of poverty seemed intractable.

Equity considerations dictated the introduction of a new array of schemes to provide some technical training for the educated unemployed, and subsidized loans and public employment to marginal and small farmers and landless laborers to increase their income and consumption. Yet it was impossible to mobilize additional resources on the scale required, or to devise many productive schemes involving the very poor…Even a substantial diversion of development resources in favor of the most impoverished groups offered only the prospect of marginal changes in the pattern of inequalities of income and consumption. But such expenditures, which could not significantly reduce the enormous numbers of the population living below the poverty line, could siphon off scarce funds to depress still further rates of growth.²³

Unable to advance her agenda in parliament, power itself became Gandhi’s primary concern.

Gandhi appeared to dissipate her energies in efforts to protect her position from any challenge within the party, and to prevent the emergence of rival centers of power by any means that came to hand. She perfected a style of coterie politics that saw a slide toward the political abyss of corruption and abuse of power.²⁴

A 1975 court ruling questioned the legitimacy of Gandhi’s election to parliament, and by extension, her role as prime minister. Gandhi attempted to get the court’s decision stayed; the stay was denied; Gandhi responded by proclaiming an internal state of emergency. The proclamation suspended constitutional rights and freedoms. The government was allowed to jail opponents, without formal charges or court hearings, for a period of two years. The leaders of the major opposition parties were arrested in this manner, and ultimately, so were more than a hundred thousand other persons. The news media were not allowed to report these arrests or any other matters that would bring the government into disrepute. The national government was authorized to make laws for the states and to require state officials to implement them.

It was a shocking act. Gandhi claimed that it had been made necessary by “the deep-seated and widespread conspiracy which has been brewing ever since I began to introduce certain progressive measures of benefit to the common man and woman in India.” The proclamation, she said, would allow these measures to be enacted.

A few days later, the proposed reforms were laid out in the Twenty-Point Economic Program. The government promised to “implement agricultural land ceilings, provide house sites for landless laborers, abolish bonded labor, liquidate rural debt, increase agricultural wages, bring prices down, step up agricultural and industrial production, socialize urban land, prevent tax evasion, confiscate the properties of smugglers, provide cheaper books for students, and enlarge overall employment.”²⁵

The agricultural land ceilings might be the most interesting of these proposals. India’s constitution gave the states exclusive jurisdiction over land reform. Nehru had pushed for cap-and-redistribute land reforms but had been opposed by the state governments. They had produced legislation that was so riddled with exemptions and qualifications that, in the end, little land was actually redistributed. Gandhi promised more substantial reforms but she, too, was thwarted by the state governments.

The revised land ceiling acts, passed by the state legislatures in 1972 and 1973, were something less than the “important advance” claimed for them. The relatively generous levels allowed for ownership of partially irrigated and dry farm land, combined with additional allotments for minor children and unmarried adult family members, all superimposed on a landownership pattern that had already been transformed by partitions and transfers of holdings to avoid the first round of ceiling legislation…resulted in a modest amount of land for redistribution. Altogether, a maximum of four million acres — about one percent of the cultivated area — was expected to become available for redistribution. In practice, slow implementation of ceiling laws, as landowners questioned the validity or the specific application of the new laws in the courts, meant that by 1975 only 62,000 acres had actually come into the possession of the states.²⁶

The proclamation removed these obstacles by allowing the national government to dictate state legislation and by restricting the individual’s right to refer government decisions to the courts.

And yet, land reform still did not occur. The difficulty lay in implementation. The Twenty-Point Economic Program was to be administered by a new hierarchical structure. At the top would be a state-level committee, led by one of the state’s chief ministers. The second and third levels would be the district and local committees. The local committees would be where the rubber met the road. Among their responsibilities would be “the implementation of land ceilings, abolition of bonded labour, liquidation of rural indebtedness, the enforcement of minimum agricultural wages”²⁷ — in short, everything that affected rural welfare. But who would the committee members be? Nehru’s Community Development program had sought to democratize village government and invigorate the panchayats, but it had manifestly failed. In most villages, the leaders were still the large landowners and the dominant castes — the people who had most to lose from the Twenty-Point initiatives.

The extent to which bonded labour was freed, or rural indebtedness liquidated, or minimum wages enforced, remains uncertain.²⁸ Land reform met with some success, through the work of a separate committee structure that was formed to speed up implementation of the existing (1972 and 1973) legislation. By the end of 1976, 1.7 million more acres had been acquired by the government and 1.1 million acres had been distributed.²⁹

Twenty-Point initiatives were more successfully implemented in urban areas. In particular, there were successes in limiting tax evasion and smuggling, and in regulating urban land use.

At the beginning of 1977, with the opposition parties in disarray, Gandhi released their imprisoned leaders and announced new general elections. She expected Congress to win easily; it lost massively. She lost her own seat in parliament. One of her last official acts was to end the internal emergency.

The new parliament was so divided that governments led by Morarji Desai (1977 – 1979) and Charan Singh (1979 – 1980) were ineffective. General elections were held in 1980. Congress won a majority in parliament. Indira Gandhi again became prime minister, a position she held until her assassination in 1984.

Gandhi’s economic policies in the 1980s were mildly liberalizing, but much of the wall of regulation built by Nehru and Gandhi was still intact when Gandhi died.

When Did India’s Growth Rate Accelerate?

The consensus among economists is that India began to grow more rapidly after 1991, the year in which India’s economic policies were radically reformed. Faster growth, especially after 2002, is clearly visible in the figure below.

Another growth acceleration occurred in the late 1980s. The annual growth rate of GDP per capita had been less than 2% in the years 1984-87, but jumped to 5.2% in the years 1988-90. However, this growth surge does not indicate a more robust economy. T. N. Srinivasan observes that it was “debt-led and fueled by employment and real wage expansion in the public sector.”³⁰ This kind of growth was not sustainable and contributed to the balance of payments crisis of 1991.

Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian believe that growth accelerated at an even earlier date:

The pickup in India’s economic growth precedes the 1991 liberalization by a full decade. Even a cursory glance at the growth record reveals that the more-than-doubling of India’s growth rate takes place sometime around 1980.³¹

Growth did not speed up because policies changed, but rather because the private sector believed that they would change.

The trigger for India’s economic growth was an attitudinal shift on the part of the national government in 1980 in favor of private business. Until that time, the rhetoric of the reigning Congress Party had been all about socialism and pro-poor policies. When Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980, she realigned herself politically with the organized private sector and dropped her previous rhetoric. The national government’s attitude toward business went from being outright hostile to supportive. Indira Gandhi switch was further reinforced, in a more explicit manner, by Rajiv Gandhi following his rise to power in 1984. This, in our view, was the key change that unleashed the animal spirits of the Indian private sector in the early 1980s.³²

Some economists, including Panagariya and Srinivasan, are deeply sceptical of this claim.

It might be useful to look directly at the annual growth rates of GDP per capita. The figure above shows that these rates were quite unstable, especially before 1980. Calculating a meaningful “average” growth rate from this data is a dicey proposition because the average will be sensitive to the endpoints chosen. For example, suppose that we look for the impact of Gandhi’s final term by comparing the average growth rates during two ten-year periods, one beginning in the year of her election (1980-89) and the other ending in the preceding year (1970-79). These endpoint choices seem natural, but the Indian economy experienced a sharp external shock in 1979. There was a severe drought, and an oil crisis (caused by the Iranian Revolution) nearly doubled the price of oil. GDP per capita fell by 7.3%. Including this year in the earlier average drags the average down. At the same time, the recovery from this shock is counted as growth, pushing up the later average. This average is also inflated by the debt-propelled extravagance of the late 1980s. In short, the first average will understate growth and the second average will overstate it. Calculating an average is easy; making sense of it is more difficult.

Some of the messiness of the data can be removed by calculating growth over a rolling three-year period rather than over a single year.³³ The results are shown in the figure below.

The beginnings of India’s growth take-off in the 1990s are clearly evident in this figure. The late-1980s boom and subsequent collapse are also clearly marked. On the other hand, an early-1980s acceleration is in the eye of the beholder. For me, the peak in 1983 doesn’t look much different from the peaks in 1977 and 1969.

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1. From the Maddison Project Database 2023: GDP per capita, measured in 2011 international dollars, was $1208 in 1961 and $1215 in 1966. ↩
2. From the World Bank: the share of manufacturing value-added in GDP declined from 15.35% to 14.50%. From the Food and Agricultural Organization: agricultural output (which includes both crops and livestock), measured in 2015 US dollars, fell from $78.44 billion to $75.28 billion. ↩
3. Indira Nehru took her husband’s name when she married Feroze Gandhi. Feroze Gandhi was not related to Mahatma Gandhi. ↩
4. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 270. ↩
5. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, pp. 271-2. ↩
6. Marci Baranski, The Globalization of Wheat (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), p. 26. ↩
7. Baranski, The Globalization of Wheat, p. 54. ↩
8. The new varieties “did not require more irrigation, but rather more precise water management. This was possible under the tubewell irrigation system prevalent in northwest India, but much of India’s “irrigated” area was not able to irrigate enough or at scheduled intervals.” (Baranski, The Globalization of Wheat, p. 84) ↩
9. From an agreement signed by Subramaniam and a US official, quoted by Baranski, The Globalization of Wheat, p. 56. ↩
10. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 317. ↩
11. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, pp. 319-20. ↩
12. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 339. ↩
13. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 388. ↩
14. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 269. ↩
15. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 271. ↩
16. Panagariya, The Nehru-Era Economic History and Thought, p. 204. ↩
17. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 341. ↩
18. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, pp. 389-90. ↩
19. “Indira Gandhi’s Economic Policies,” CIA Intelligence Memorandum, 1973, p. 6. ↩
20. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi (Ecco, 2019), p. 434. ↩
21. Panagariya, The Nehru-Era Economic History and Thought, p. 210. ↩
22. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 496. The included quote is from a Tata Industries submission to the government. ↩
23. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, pp. 491-2. ↩
24. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 517. ↩
25. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 547. ↩
26. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 507. ↩
27. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 549. ↩
28. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 551-2. ↩
29. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, p. 549-50. ↩
30. Srinivasan, “Comments on ‘From Hindu Growth to Productivity Surge’,” IMF Staff Papers (2005). ↩
31. Rokrik and Subramanian, “From ‘Hindu Growth’ to Productivity Surge,” IMF Working Paper, 2004, p. 4. ↩
32. Rokrik and Subramanian, “From ‘Hindu Growth’ to Productivity Surge,” IMF Working Paper, 2004, p. 4. ↩
33. Define y(t) as GDP per capita in year t. In the first figure, the growth rate in year t is the percentage by which y(t) exceeds y(t-1). In the second figure, it is the percentage by which y(t) exceeds y(t-3). ↩