the process of development. In agriculture, social and economic justice was to be achieved through a process of land reforms which would empower the cultivator. In industry, the state would play an active role by setting up major industries under the public sector. These were to be achieved through a comprehensive process of planning under Five Year Plans.
These strategies had been borrowed from the Soviet experience of rapid economic development. Nehru was a Jawaharlal Nehru great admirer of the success of the Soviet Union in achieving rapid development, and thus the ideology on which this strategy is based is often referred to as “Nehruvian Socialism”. Agricultural Policy At the time of Independence, agriculture in India was beset with many problems. In general, productivity was low.
The total production of food grains was not enough to feed the country, so that a large quantity of food grains had to be imported. Nearly percent of the population depended on agriculture for their livelihood. This automatically reduced the income of each person to very low levels. This is a situation described as ‘disguised unemployment’.
That is, even if many people shifted to other occupations, total production levels would remain the same, because this surplus population was not really required to sustain the activity, and was, in effect, unemployed. Given the high level of poverty among the rural population, most of them were heavily indebted to moneylenders. The backwardness of agriculture could be attributed to two factors: institutional and technological. Institutional factors refer to the social and economic relations that prevailed, particularly between the land-owning classes and the cultivating classes.
Technological factors relate to use of better seeds, improved methods of cultivation, use of chemical fertilizers, use of machinery like tractors and harvester combines, and provision of irrigation. The government decided to tackle the institutional drawbacks first and began a programme of land reforms to improve the conditions in agriculture. The basic assumption was that such measures would improve the efficiency of land use or productivity, apart from empowering the peasants by creating a socially just system.