ABSTRACT
The keystone of the American agricultural technology complex is the land-grant university, and administrative logic might suggest that public entrepreneurs in other countries would focus first on creating parallel educational facilities. By the 1960s India’s “extension bias” was widely regarded a mistake, and public investment began to favor agricultural research instead. On the Indian side, leading organizational participants included the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, the Planning Commission, the Ministry of Community Development, and the Ministry of Agriculture. Agriculture continued to be economically important, representing over one-third of national income in the mid-1980s. The farm advisory services are administratively separate from the rest of the agricultural technology complex. Technology seemed to be the package program’s Achilles’ heel after all, for as Ford Foundation economist W. David Hopper discovered, the best Indian farmers already got just as good yields with traditional practices.
