Innovation Adoption in Indian Agriculture—the High Yielding Varieties Programme

Abstract

Whilst reading agricultural economics for the postgraduate Diploma in Agricultural Science at Cambridge University, the author's attention was caught by two reports on recent developments in Indian agriculture. These were the ‘I.A.D.P. Third Report 1965–7’, and the ‘First Evaluation Study of the High Yielding Varieties Programme for 1967–8’. Although the information was generalized and the samples involved biased towards most successful areas, certain trends and conclusions emerged relating to the progress of innovation adoption in simple agricultural communities and the influences at work on the mechanism. Subsequent field work in north-west India provided firstly some of the detail lacked by the All-India statistics and, secondly, some insight into the problems faced by economically progressive districts of relevance to less developed ones.