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 source 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.
Similarly, in a now-forgotten period of history, some ingenious mind invented a mechanical device, known since then as ‘the Persian wheel’, for lifting large quantities of sub-soil water from wells for irrigation, using mainly animal power and very little human labour. This technology was imported into India and widely adopted centuries back in the Indo-Gangetic valley. … . How many economists however have cared to study the nature and impact of technological changes of this kind? Very few as yet in India, it would seem. Some western scientists have of course begun to notice the good things in China, such as how energy-saving are the traditional techniques of Chinese agriculture. Wet rice cultivation in China, it is now being pointed out, is very efficient in energy-conversion, unlike the western systems of farming which depend heavily on petroleum as an energy source; that a calorie of food consumed by farmers engaged in cultivation on irrigated land in China yields 40 times as much in terms of the rice produced; and that it is this which makes it possible for a Chinese family to maintain itself on 1/2 acre of fertile land. … . But these are relatively new ideas for a good many in India, ideas which have yet to penetrate deeply into the consciousness of administrators and even scientists. … .
Dr. Rao reserves however to the very end one of his most important observations about the nature of the technological change in Indian agriculture in recent times. He points out that inadequacy of public investment in irrigation and land reclamation is a glaring feature of the prevailing strategy, and says that this reflects essentially the bias of big farmers in the countryside and of the urban elite. … .