ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore what influence, if any, the technological innovations that have been introduced into Indian agriculture since the mid-1960s have had upon the process of class formation and upon class action in the countryside. The important thing to establish is the considerable spread of mechanization in Indian agriculture, in certain limited areas in which the new varieties have been adopted, since the mid-1960s. Agriculture grew at around 3% per annum, there was some extension of the irrigated area, and some rise in commercialization. There had been landless laborers in India since Mughal times, and their numbers certainly increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1950-1951, 15% of all agricultural families in India were without land. A long-standing contradiction seemed to be reaching a critical stage: a crisis of accumulation in the Indian economy, which could only be resolved, ultimately by the state appropriating the agricultural surplus and utilizing it for productive investment outside of agriculture.
