ABSTRACT
Farm mechanization has come to stand for a dynamic agriculture. Rapid farm mechanization in both the Soviet Union and the West has been associated with extension of cultivated area, increasing labor productivity in agriculture and generating ancillary jobs in the manufacture and maintenance of farm implements and machines. The initial strategy for agricultural mechanization was proposed well before Pakistani independence. In the elections of December 1970, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party scored tremendous electoral successes in the Punjab and Sind through appeals to the rural and urban dispossessed and promises of redemption of the poor through creation of a socialist society. For the military/bureaucratic elite who formulated Pakistan's public policy after the coup, stagnation in agriculture represented a serious obstacle to national development. The reluctance of traditional landlords to adopt, or promote through government policy, an expensive and alien technology had both economic and political roots.
