ABSTRACT

Agricultural development is usually better served by three-way organizations, because the structure encourages external links, needed for support, and fosters innovative behavior among professors and students, needed to discover new technology. As the First Five Year Plan put it, agricultural education erred by not using a “dirty hands” method and by overemphasizing theory at the expense of practical applications. The malaise in agricultural education was symptomatic of wider problems in higher learning. The structure of US higher educational institutions was also different from India’s. American agricultural education’s site in the public sector also meshed with the Congress party’s socialist ideology. In November 1948 the University Education Commission was set up to review the country’s entire system of higher education. At the state agricultural universities instruction remains didactic, with heavy use of lectures and rote memorization. Agricultural research is a similar tale of divergence from the American exemplar.