Technological progress has taken very diverse forms in different environmental conditions and periods of history, so diverse that it has sometimes not even been recognized as such when viewed through unfamiliar eyes. ‘No Chinese peasant’, commented Victor Hugo, ‘goes to the city without carrying back, at the end of his bamboo, two buckets of what we call filth.’ Europeans naturally found it an abhorrent practice. But it must have been a great leap forward for China—greater perhaps than any recorded since then—when it stumbled upon this technique of (what we now call) ‘recycling’ by returning animal and human waste into the soil. For centuries the ubiquitous Chinese pig has been not only a favourite sou55.00rce of animal protein but in effect a cheap and mobile fertilizer plant for raising the productivity of land to levels hitherto unknown. It is only in the last few years that the technological potential of ‘filth’ has begun to be fully recognized by the West for what it is worth.
How Green You Are
K.N. Raj
TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE AND DISTRIBUTION OF GAINS IN INDIAN AGRICULTURE by C.H. Hanumantha Rao Macmillan, India, 1976, 249 pp., 55.00
PULSES: AN ANALYSIS OF DEMAND AND SUPPLY IN INDIAby Kusum Chopra and Gurushri Swamy Strling Publishers, , 132 pp., 30.00
April 1976, volume 1, No 2