Education, Innovations, and Agricultural Development

A Study of North India (1961-72)

D. P. Chaudhri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000519693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

First published in 1979, Education, Innovations, and Agricultural Development investigates the effect of education on agricultural productivity and innovations that took place in the wake of the Green Revolution in North India, using a simultaneous equations model. The Green Revolution of the 1960s, with its twin aims of raising production and improving the quality of input, was expected to induce a majority of farming families to respond to policies and programmes devised for bringing about development in agricultural sectors.

Focusing on the wheat-growing areas of Punjab and Haryana, where high yielding varieties of seed have been introduced extensively, it shows that general education up to secondary level has a significant impact on the diffusion of technology and agricultural productivity and that higher production in turn increases the demand for education. This book deserves to be read by all concerned with development in Asian countries; agriculture; developmental economics; and educationists.

1 FARMERS’ EDUCATION, INNOVATIONS, PRODUCTIVITY AND EMPLOYMENT

Development prospects of most of the less developed countries in the Asian region perforce depend upon the development of their agricultural sectors. Production in this predominant sector of their economies is largely organised on the basis of family farms.¹ An agricultural development strategy, in the absence of collectivist agriculture, must induce a majority of these farming families to respond to policies and programmes devised for this purpose. A strategy of agricultural development in essence implies a systematic attempt at disturbing the low level equilibrium in traditional agriculture. Low level equilibrium is reflected in terms of low and static productivity, whichever way we may choose to measure it. One of the essential components of the strategy would be a qualitative change in the input factors used in agricultural production with or without prior changes in the institutional structure. A successful disturbance of the low level equilibrium in the agricultural sector * would be observable in: (a) changes in level of productivity and acceleration in its rate of growth, and (b) changes in the quality of input factors accompanied by a substantial increase in the use of superior quality, yield raising, modernising input factors. These changes are usually referred to as the diffusion of innovations.

The Green Revolution, as a strategy of agricultural development in the Asian region, was expected to achieve precisely this objective for a majority of the farmers. The use of high yielding varieties of seed with controlled doses of chemical fertilisers and irrigation was supposed to be technically scale neutral and thus within the reach of all farmers.² In this monograph we attempt to investigate the relationship between (a) farm workers’ education and agricultural productivity, and (b) farm workers’ education and the adoption of innovations like high yielding variety seeds, the use of chemical fertilisers and of co-operative and other similar facilities.

Empirical exercises relate to Panjab and Haryana states of India. This region has traditionally been a wheat producing area and the successful introduction of dwarf varieties of high yielding wheat seed during the early 1960s in this region has created one of the notable success stories of the Green Revolution.

In this study we propose to investigate the contribution of cultivators’ education³ to the increase in agricultural output and productivity either by a better choice of inputs or by a more effective use of labour. To the extent that some farmers are able to produce more from a given set of inputs or perform the same agricultural operations, using their labour, yielding higher output, they will be employing their own abilities to a fuller extent and they will be using their own, their family’s and hired labour more effectively. In this sense they might be reducing ‘slack’ in the use of human resources. Whether the number of people employed increases or decreases would depend upon the level of technology and the substitutions they carry out. These are functions of the technical possibilities of substitution and the relative prices of the input factors. Some technological change itself might be induced because some farmers decide to innovate and experiment while others wait till the economic profitability of these innovations is established and technological change becomes less risky. One of the interesting questions worth exploring is who are these progressive farmers who innovate first? What are their characteristics? Progressiveness probably constitutes a superior information field and better access to the resources required to innovate. We shall explore some of these questions in this monograph.

Farmers can acquire economically useful information in many ways. In the situation of traditional agriculture, as defined by Schultz (1964), where there are no additional economic overheads, no additional research results becoming available and no institutional changes being introduced by development planners, farmers find themselves in a state of long run equilibrium. The two sources of disturbances are (a) natural factors, and (b) market factors. The farmers by historical experience learn to provide self-insurance by choosing a cropping pattern which will not necessarily give them maximum yield in any particular year but will assure stable yield every year. An example of this is the mixture of wheat and gram sown by farmers in North India. Diversification of the cropping pattern, even on very small farms, is also a kind of self-insurance which farmers learn to provide by long experience of dealing with nature. The second source of uncertainty, the market factors, creates different responses among farmers. The small farmers probably tend to become subsistence farmers producing mainly for consumption and using mostly home produced inputs, while the large farmers tend to produce for the market and try to stabilise their incomes by maintaining a diverse cropping pattern. These farmers also find learning to decode market information economically useful.⁴ Thus economic dualism as described by Sen (1966) emerges. We get a set of subsistence farmers, economically rational but having a different objective function (maximisation of utility) and a set of market oriented farmers maximising profits.

Once agents of change appear on the scene in the form of state authorities wanting to change agricultural institutions, regulate markets and disseminate agricultural research information, the knowledge acquired by historical experience ceases to be adequate and it becomes necessary for individual cultivators to decode the new information and distinguish the economically useful from the economically useless. This ability to decode new information may come to the farmers in various ways.

(a) The farmers might learn to critically examine it as ‘learning by doing’. This, as explained by Arrow (1962), would provide greater ability to those who already have the experience and who have already been decoding this kind of information and would be less useful to those who are being initiated into the use of new techniques embodied in capital.

(b) The state can devise an elaborate extension system, such as demonstration plots to inform farmers of the new information on inputs, techniques etc. This can be done by personal contacts of the extension agents or through the use of mass media like radio, television.

(c) In close-knit village communities there is a lot of personal, family and social interaction among farmers with different types of information field. This interaction can also contribute to an expansion of the information field of the farmer.

All these methods enlarge the farmers’ information field. But the ability to separate out the useful information from the not so useful still has to be with the farmer himself. In this way we postulate that progressiveness may depend on the information field and the information field can be expanded by (a) learning by doing, (b) state effort in terms of extension and demonstration, (c) information learning through social interaction, and (d) reading about the economically useful information in journals, books and extension agencies’ propaganda leaflets. We propose to explore the hypothesis that farmers with formal education of a general type are the early adopters of yield raising inputs. This is probably because their information field is superior and also because they are able to evaluate this information more accurately because of their ability to read and write. This ability to evaluate economically useful information more accurately and more quickly ought to reflect itself, if it exists, in the use of yield raising inputs and the value of agricultural produce per unit of land or labour.

The choice of the measure of productivity will depend upon the purpose for which one is measuring it. For a study of agricultural modernisation in a country like India, a partial measure, representing productivity per unit of labour, land or capital would be reasonably adequate. Of these three input factors, land is most scarce in the short period. Therefore, productivity per unit of land would be a reasonable proxy for agricultural development. This is particularly important in view of the fact that the land/labour ratio in this part of the world is unfavourable and there is a widespread belief that under-employment and disguised employment is widely prevalent in the agricultural sector of India.

Measurement of the degree of unemployment among self-employed agricultural workers (hereafter called ‘cultivators’) is a tricky question.⁵ The three aspects of unemployment mentioned by Sen (1975) may, in their case, give us different answers. Since the land available to each cultivating household is given in the short period and the household’s ability to adjust it is rather limited in view of the land reform laws affecting leasing in and leasing out, and since the possibilities of extending the area under cultivation in districts of Panjab and Haryana are extremely limited, the most scarce factor these households operate with is the area cultivated. Since farmers’ economic rationality in agricultural production activity in this region is not questioned,⁶ they would tend to augment land by substituting other input factors wherever it is technically feasible and relative prices allow it. Therefore, measurement of the productivity per hectare would be a reasonably accurate index of their level of agricultural development. A change in yield per hectare over time would reflect the growth of productivity reasonably well. The degree of employment or the changes in intensity of employment among cultivators would be reflected in changes in agricultural output per worker over a period of time. As mentioned above, these changes would come about only through changes in the quality of inputs used and substitution of inferior quality inputs by superior quality, yield raising, inputs. Economists study this phenomenon ex post as ‘technical change’. Sociologists have attempted certain explanations of why the diffusion rates in the use of these superior quality yield raising inputs differ among different groups of people.⁷

Clive Bell (1972) in a paper on the ‘Acquisition of Agricultural Technology’, written in a philosophical vein, goes into neo-classical economic reasoning relating to acquisition of superior agricultural technology. He points out that there appear to be three fundamental questions beyond the economists’ unaided reach:

1. What are the various decision rules followed, and which types of farmers are guided by them?

2. What causes one farmer to innovate when another of identical status, kin, power, etc., does not?

3. Granted that a farmer in a community attempts to innovate, what kinds of social pressure are brought to bear to prevent his doing so? And if he succeeds, what social and political obstacles are placed in the way of others, possibly less privileged and powerful, attempting to follow his example?

In this study we propose to investigate some aspects of these questions with a major hypothesis that farmers with a superior information field are among the first to innovate. Superiority of information field i.e., the ability to know what, why, when and where, may be more widely prevalent among farmers with a general formal education. And it is this superiority of information which reduces the risk element in innovation and induces them to adopt new inputs, techniques and practices and they are known as innovators. We may call such cultivators progressive farmers.

If we find that cultivators with a higher level of general education are adopting innovations embodied in yield raising inputs, then we would know that they would tend to create employment for themselves and other working members of their families directly which would be reflected in an increase in agricultural output per worker. This would reduce ‘slack’ in the employment of their family labour but will not be reflected in statistics of unemployment and employment as collected in conventional ways. This would also enable the cultivators to use their entrepreneurial ability more effectively, because in a dynamic agriculture the decisions regarding the choice of inputs, the choice of crops and the decisions relating to the disposal of the output become economically more important since most of the yield raising inputs have to be purchased from the market and have to be paid for in money terms. This would necessitate cultivators’ participation in the monetised market for agricultural inputs and outputs. Larger output per farm and per worker on the farm would also increase the scale of operations in the economic sense even though their farm size has not changed. This would necessitate more intensive management which is a part of entrepreneurial activity. All this would create employment in the economic sense and would be reflected in our second concept of employment, namely ‘contribution to production’. The larger output per unit of land may also tend to shift the demand curve for landless agricultural labourers to the right. The extent of this shift would depend upon the relative prices of labour and its nearest substitute and also the degree of availability of the substitutes. In any case, a rising tendency in the real wages of the landless agricultural labourers over time is indicative of the demand for labour shifting to the right. Since we know that the possibility of extending the area under cultivation has largely been exhausted in Panjab and Haryana, so there would be a higher demand for labour only when land can be augmented by labour or other input factors. Double cropping and multiple cropping reflected in the intensity of land use are very good indices of land augmentation. We shall explore these questions in chapter 3.

We find that the generation of employment that contributes to output in the agricultural sector organised on a family farm basis would be reflected in terms of a higher yield per hectare, a higher yield per worker in the case of cultivators, and an increase in wages for landless labourers only when the supply curve of labour is upward sloping and the demand curve shifts to the right. All these ought to be related to the use of yield raising inputs and the proportion of cultivators who choose to do so.

To explore these questions we shall specifically study the following four possibilities: (a) the role of farmers’ education in influencing (i) the level of agricultural productivity, and (ii) the growth of agricultural productivity between 1961 and 1972; (b) the role of farmers’ education in influencing the use of yield raising or cost reducing inputs in the same period; (c) the role of farmers’ education in the expansion of agricultural institutions like co-operative marketing, co-operative credit etc.; (d) the role of agricultural labourers’ education in influencing the wages and conditions of employment of agricultural workers.

The first and second, if found empirically valid, would imply that farmers’ education induces a quick spread of innovations which in turn affects employment by reducing the slack in family labour working on their own farms. The third would indicate a relationship between a farmer’s education and change in those rural institutions which are conducive to innovations. The last one would indicate whether the quality of labour represented by the educational differences among agricultu...