Indian Innovation, Not Jugaad - 100 Ideas that Transformed India

As India turns 75, Indian Innovation unpacks 100 ideas that transformed a young democratic republic into a complex and thriving nation of a billion-plus people. With compelling urgency and the lucidity of a skilled narrator, Dinesh C. Sharma writes of an India newly independent in 1947 after the British colonial powers left it to its own destiny, of its subsequent wavering journey through the decades all the way to a raging pandemic and of the small and big innovations that paved the way for India. In doing so, he turns on their heads prevailing notions of innovation often propagated in a galaxy of books on the much used and abused narrative of jugaad that romance the idea of how the ‘poor’ innovate to get by. Very often, a bulk of the writing heavily focuses on technological, novel, IT or digital solutions and disruptions alone, many of which fizzle out as one-time wonders. Sharma does the difficult job of writing about the original disruptions that revolutionized the way things were done in a particular sector and context. Covering policies, concepts, and institutions in areas such as, but not limited to, science, healthcare, education, governance, business, grassroots movements, agriculture, fashion, law and others, this is a book one needs to read to better understand India. Propulsively put together with effortless prose, Sharma’s writing, with his decades’ long journalistic understanding of science, technology, environment, and communities, is teeming with stories and anecdotes of innovations that went on to change the lives of Indians forever. From software parks to shampoo sachets, jan sunwais to oxygen langars, Lijjat papad to mohalla clinics, the Chipko movement to Khabar Lahariya, this is also the story of the unknown, unsung people behind these innovations who are continuing to shape India as we know it.

OTHER LOTUS TITLES Anil Dharker Icons: Men & Women Who Shaped Today’s India Aitzaz Ahsan The Indus Saga: The Making of Pakistan Ajay Mansingh Firaq Gorakhpuri: The Poet of Pain & Ecstasy Anjum Altaf and Amit Basole Thinking with Ghalib: Poetry for a New Generation Aruna Roy The RTI Story: Power to the People Ashis Ray Laid to Rest: The Controversy of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Death Bertil Falk Feroze: The Forgotten Gandhi Harinder Baweja A Soldier’s Diary: Kargil – The Inside Story Jenny Housego A Woven Life Kobad Ghandy Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir A Story of Passion, Commitment and a Search for Justice and Freedom Kunal Purandare Ramakant Achrekar: A Biography Lakshmi Subramanian Singing Gandhi’s India: Music and Sonic Nationalism Maj. Gen. Ian Cardozo Param Vir: Our Heroes in Battle Maj. Gen. Ian Cardozo The Sinking of INS Khukri: What Happened in 1971 Moin Mir Surat: Fall of a Port, Rise of a Prince, Defeat of the East India Company in the House of Commons Monisha Rajesh Around India in 80 Trains Munshi Faizuddin Bazm-i Aakhir: The Last Gathering A vivid portrait of life in the Red Fort Narinder Singh Kapany The Man Who Bent Light Ralph Russell The Famous Ghalib: The Sound of My Moving Pen Rahul Bedi The Last Word: Obituaries of 100 Indians Who Led Unusual Lives Rasheed Kidwai The House of Scindias: A Saga of Power, Politics and Intrigue Rashmi Sadana Metronama: Scenes from the Delhi Metro R.V. Smith Delhi: Unknown Tales of a City Shrabani Basu Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan Shahrayar Khan Bhopal Connections: Vignettes of Royal Rule S. Hussain Zaidi Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia Sunetra Choudhury Behind Bars: Prison Tales of India’s Most Famous Sunil Gupta and Sunetra Choudhury Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer Tamal Bandyopadhyay Pandemonium: The Great Indian Banking Tragedy Thomas Weber Going Native: Gandhi’s Relationship with Western Women Thomas Weber Gandhi at First Sight Vaibhav Purandare Sachin Tendulkar: A Definitive Biography Vappala Balachandran A Life in Shadow: The Secret Story of ACN Nambiar – A Forgotten Anti-Colonial Warrior Various The Dark Hour: India Under Lockdowns Vir Sanghvi Men of Steel: India’s Business Leaders in Candid Conversation

FORTHCOMING TITLE Maj. Gen. Ian Cardozo Cartoos Saa



ROLI BOOKS This digital edition published in India, 2022 The Lotus Collection An Imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd M-75, Greater Kailash- II Market New Delhi 110 048 Phone: ++91 (011) 40682000 Email: [email protected] Website: www.rolibooks.com © Dinesh C. Sharma, 2022 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, print reproduction, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Roli Books. Any unauthorized distribution of this e-book may be considered a direct infringement of copyright and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. eISBN: 978-93-92130-08-3 All rights reserved.

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction I. The Revolutions 1. Green Revolution 2. White Revolution 3. Blue Revolution 4. Yellow Revolution 5. The Egg Revolution 6. IT Revolution 7. Communication Revolution II. Food, Water and Sanitation 8. The Swaraj Tractor 9. India Mark II Deep Well Pump

10. Midday Meal Scheme 11. Ready-mixes for Indian Foods 12. Food for Work 13. Integrated Child Development Scheme 14. Right to Food 15. Sulabh Toilets III. Health and Medical Research 16. National Family Planning Programme 17. ASHA 18. Generic Drugs 19. Affordable Vaccines 20. Pulse Polio 21. Aravind Eyecare Model 22. Affordable Heart Surgery 23. Universal Iodization of Salt

24. The Jaipur Foot 25. Oral Rehydration Therapy 26. Mohalla Clinics 27. Home-based Palliative Care 28. Open-source Drug Discovery 29. Swasthya Sahayak 30. Green Corridor for Organ Transplants 31. FELUDA and Low-cost Ventilators 32. Oxygen Langar IV. Transport and Mobility 33. Three-wheeled Scooter Rickshaws 34. Maruti 800 35. REVA Electric Car 36. Delhi Metro Rail 37. E-rickshaws

38. Air Deccan: Affordable Air Travel 39. The Golden Quadrilateral 40. Yulu Shared E-bike V. Information and Communication Technologies 41. Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) 42. Software Technology Parks 43. STD/PCO 44. Internet Kiosks 45. Simputer 46. Missed Call Marketing 47. Online Matchmaking 48. Chota Recharge 49. Traditional Knowledge Digital Database VI. Governance, Public Utilities and Law 50. Indelible Ink and Other Ideas

51. Electronic Voting Machines 52. Computerized Passenger Railway Reservations 53. Bhoomi 54. Lok Adalats 55. Employment Guarantee 56. Public Interest Litigation 57. Cyclone Warning 58. Right to Information 59. Social Audits 60. Unique Identification (UID)/Aadhaar 61. Jan Dhan Yojana VII. Education 62. Indian Institutes of Technology 63. Indian Institutes of Management 64. All India Institute of Medical Sciences

65. National Institute of Design 66. Total Literacy Campaign 67. Navodaya Vidyalaya 68. Birla Industrial and Technological Museum 69. Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research 70. Foldscopes 71. Happiness Curriculum VIII. Grassroots Technologies and Movements 72. Improved Chulha 73. Nutan Wick Stove 74. Sachet Revolution 75. Sanitary Pad-making Machine 76. Honey Bee Network 77. Lijjat Papad 78. SEWA Microfinance Model

IX. Art, Culture, Cinema, Architecture, Sports 79. Playback Singing 80. Binaca Geet Mala 81. Indipop 82. SPIC-MACAY 83. Nehru Jacket 84. Designer Khadi 85. Festivals of India 86. Palace on Wheels 87. Dilli Haat 88. Birla Mandir 89. Chandigarh 90. Laurie Baker Architecture 91. Indian Premier League X. Environment and People’s Movements

92. Project Tiger 93. Chipko Movement 94. Revival of Arvari 95. Navdanya Seed Bank 96. Dhara Vikas 97. Barefoot Engineers 98. Artificial Glaciers 99. Khabar Lahariya 100. MigrantWatch: Citizen Science About the Author

Acknowledgements Drawing up a mega list of innovations spanning decades and across sectors can be challenging, hazardous and vulnerable to criticism. Here is how I navigated through this. To begin with, let’s look at the advantages. I have lived through a large part of the period the book covers. In that sense, it is broadly a journey of exploring innovations that impacted the lives of people of my generation. Procuring grains from a ration shop was a routine activity for millions of Indians in the 1960s. Kids would often be sent to ‘fair price’ shops to check if the stock of wheat had arrived. This was because the food supplies were erratic and dependent on imports. I also remember the images of lush green farms, signalling the Green Revolution, in the Films Division newsreels screened in cinema halls. Just as the grain supplies were easing, the Oil Shock hit us in the early 1970s, making kerosene scarcer. The response came in the form of a red-and- green wick stove named ‘Nutan’, which made its appearance in millions of Indian kitchens. Its blue flame became the talk of the town. The long waiting list for a landline phone connection, serpentine queues to book a railway ticket or trying to buy a car in ‘black’ were all part of the folklore of the 1970s and 1980s. Innovations and creative policy changes helped us address them all. The economic liberalization and globalization in the 1990s and beyond ushered in several changes. This lived experience was at the back of my mind while drawing up a list of post-Independence innovations. In addition, my professional experience of writing a book on the history of electronics and computing a few years back has helped me develop a perspective of how changes occurred in these sectors. I also had a more recent template to start with. In 2017, when India turned seventy, I wrote a news story on ‘seven defining contributions of science and technology’ that have had ‘great social and economic impacts and had, directly and indirectly, touched the lives of ordinary Indians’. It was syndicated by India Science Wire and published in several news outlets. The seven contributions listed in the story were the Green Revolution, White Revolution, satellite and communication revolution, drugs and vaccine manufacturing, C-DOT and telecom revolution, information technology (IT) revolution and railway computerization, and the Blue Revolution. Around the same time, when the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) planned to publish an anthology, Indian Science Transforming India, its editor, L.S. Shashidhara, asked me to contribute a chapter. Still, the task at hand was challenging on two counts – expanding the list to 100 and areas beyond science and technology. A third challenge was defining innovation. Here, my continued interactions with innovation guru, Professor Anil Gupta, as well as scores of grassroots innovators spotted and nurtured by him during the past two decades came in handy. These interactions have made me appreciate and see value in innovations beyond research laboratories and formal systems. My past exchanges with policymakers like the late Dr N. Seshagiri and N. Vittal convinced me that creative and ‘out of the box’ approaches can produce innovative ideas in rigid bureaucratic frameworks too. Many such ‘policy innovations’ feature in this book. The same holds good for ideas emanating from civil society movements, business and marketing, industry, entertainment and so on. That’s how the century in this book was scored. The idea of this book originated from Chirag Thakkar, Commissioning Editor at Roli, who reached out to me first in August 2019 via my website. We discussed the possibility of a book on ‘100 transformative innovations’

in the lounge of India International Centre (IIC) over cookies and coffee. It set me thinking, and after a series of email exchanges, I had a draft list of innovations that we discussed at the Roli office with Priya Kapoor and the team. One of the valuable outcomes of the brainstorming was the need to highlight the people behind innovations and dissemination. A few close friends – historians, senior journalists, academics and social scientists – informally vetted the list or parts of it. Yet, I am conscious that the final list remains a subjective one and may attract criticism for overlooking some innovations while including others perceived as ‘less deserving’. By the time I finally got down to writing, the pandemic was already knocking at India’s doors, rather, airports and ports. Most of the core writing was done during the lockdown and ‘unlocking’ period in the first half of 2020. I could write swiftly because the chapters are modular though connected in some ways. With ‘work from home’ setting in, everyone in the family – Annu, Maanvi and Kushagr – was around, making the writing exercise enjoyable and stimulating. I revised the text in 2021 – and updated the list to include pandemic-related ideas – while working from the IIC library, which provides a great ambience for serious writing work. I am grateful to everyone who was part of the journey of this book, directly or indirectly. Special thanks are due to the editorial, design and marketing teams at Roli for their professional approach throughout this project. Dinesh C. Sharma New Delhi July 2021

Introduction India’s Innovation Journey At the age of seventy-five, we are supposed to be past our prime and are expected to lead a quiet retired life. In the journey of a nation, however, seventy-five years is not a long period but certainly, it is time to pause and reflect. And perhaps an occasion for cautious celebration. India’s journey as an independent country began with the attainment of political freedom in 1947, but it was only the first step. The country was steeped in poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, ill health, irrationality, superstitions, inequality and injustice. The scars of long colonial rule were evident in all spheres of activity. A bunch of political leaders, scientists, engineers, industrialists and planners had done a great amount of spadework in the run-up to Independence, imagining a modern and self-reliant India. They envisaged science and technology as a major input in this process of regeneration and development. Converting these dreams – and plans – into reality was a tall order and needed massive resources and manpower. Ingenious ways had to be found to move forward and many people with the vision to find these ways did so. That’s what laid the foundation of an innovative India. The first major test of the newly founded republic came in 1952 when the gigantic task of holding general elections in a country where barely 15 per cent of people could read and write posed a great challenge. It was addressed with novel visual communication methods to identify candidates and parties on the ballot paper, while the handicap imposed by the lack of proper identification documents was overcome with the use of indelible ink developed by Indian scientists. The streak of innovations in the election process continued with the invention of the electronic voting machine in 1979 by a public sector company revolutionizing the election process in the decades to come. High-yielding varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice, based on semi-dwarf varieties from Mexico, ushered in the Green Revolution. A tractor specially designed for the smaller size of an Indian landholding, aptly named ‘Swaraj’, played a catalyst in the process while bumper crops necessitated the development of post-harvest technologies, which in turn, gave birth to the instantfood industry. The innovation of ready-mixes of Indian sweets such as gulab jamuns and jalebis was a rage in Indian kitchens in the 1970s. Further equipping women was ‘Nutan’, a fuel-efficient kerosene stove developed in direct response to the oil shock of 1974. Around the same time began the drive to change the design of the ubiquitous wood-burning chulha (stove). Developing human resources needed for building a modern nation was on top of the post-Independence agenda. A string of higher education institutions was founded in the fields of engineering, technology, medicine, management, agriculture, design, architecture and so on. Each of them was developed in a novel way – partnerships with the world’s leading universities, industry, philanthropists, state and central governments – with a special focus to ensure their functional autonomy. These centres of higher learning became the cradle of new ideas and technologies while providing high-quality manpower for government and industry, particularly for computer, communications and software revolutions, over the decades. Foundational work done at some of these institutions became the basis for the formulation of new national policies and programmes. The streak of institution-building was revived in the 1990s and the 2000s.

The Nehruvian era until the 1970s was marked by shortages, resulting from restrictive industrial policies and the focus on import-substitution. At that time, the waiting period for a telephone connection was several years. Personal cars were considered luxury products and car companies were allowed to manufacture only a limited number of cars. Even for a two-wheeler scooter, one had to wait for years. Innovative policies and products changed the situation dramatically in the 1980s. Dependence on imports in telecom ended with an electronic switch (the C-DOT rural exchange) developed for Indian conditions, in just thirty-six months. A revolutionary idea of making available the technology freely to the private sector broke the monopoly of foreign companies and helped in a rapid expansion of the telephone network. Access to telecom services was dramatically expanded through another innovation – public phone booths popularly known as STD PCOs. In the same way, Software Technology Parks were conceived to help small firms export software without owning data communication infrastructure. The computerization of the railway passenger reservation system is another example of a new technology benefiting the common man. In the 1990s, the land records’ computerization, Bhoomi, helped end petty corruption and eliminate middlemen. All these are great innovations, given that they took place in the pre-internet era and when access to even basic devices like landline telephones was low. The shortage mentality gave rise to several innovations in product design and marketing of services. The ‘missed call’ is a classic example. When the mobile phone service was introduced, the call charges were very high and consumers had to pay even for receiving an incoming call. This gave birth to the innovation of the ‘missed call’ which is used to convey pre-decided short messages such as ‘I am leaving’ or ‘I have arrived’ between two callers. ‘Chota (small) recharge’ is another marketing innovation that has helped mobile companies cater to daily wage earners. It perhaps drew its inspiration from the sachet revolution that began in South India with tiny shampoo packets selling for as low as 50 paise to make costly products affordable to consumers at the so-called Bottom of the Pyramid enunciated by economist C.K. Prahalad. In the same way, the innovation of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) makes digital payment possible even for people without smartphones. New models of delivery or production or service, and ‘out of the box’ ways of building institutions also proved to be great innovations. The Delhi Metro is an example. It was executed through a novel partnership between the state and central governments, and not as a subsidiary or division of the Indian Railways. The mechanism facilitated faster decision-making, sharing of responsibility, ease in financial borrowings and so on. Innovative policies, government programmes and laws have also ushered in change. The best example in this category is the Indian Patent Act enacted in 1970, which recognized the process patent – in place of the product patent – a change that made the production of affordable generic drugs possible in India. India’s journey since 1947 shows that innovation is not just related to technology as seen in the West. In this book, the term ‘innovation’ has been used in the broadest possible sense. It covers technological innovations, novel scientific solutions, new ideas in business and industry, path-breaking government policies and programmes, grassroots innovations, laws and regulations designed to serve a unique purpose, new ways of institution-building, people’s movements and practices. Though several science and technology-led innovations figure in this book, it is not supposed to be documentation of India’s achievements in space, atomic energy, biotechnology, engineering and so on. Given the diverse nature of innovations and new ideas across sectors, it was a tough task mapping innovations over seventy-five years. Certain criteria had to be defined for inclusion or exclusion. Broadly, these criteria are the disruptive nature of innovations, turning points or the watershed character of innovations in various fields, new ideas that triggered a trend and innovations that had a lasting impact on society, in general.

The seventy-five-year journey also shows that Indian innovation is not jugaad – a term that has attained some amount of respectability thanks to management gurus and Western experts. They often use ‘jugaad’ to describe frugal and grassroots innovations in the Indian context. This is rather fallacious because jugaad is not innovation. It is a quick fix, a short-term solution to overcome inefficiency in a system or product or shortcomings in infrastructure, and has harmful consequences for users. Jugaad connotes improvisation to fulfil certain immediate needs. Anyone who understands the social-cultural context of jugaad would know it is not innovation but a representation of a mindset that promotes crude improvization which is not always safe or sustainable. The jugaad is said to have emerged in the 1960s in Punjab where farmers put together a contraption by attaching a pump set engine with discarded automobiles’ parts and a four-wheeled cart. It was used to transport agricultural produce and people over short distances. Solutions based on jugaad, according to Anil K. Gupta in his book Grassroots Innovation, are an indicator of ‘what we lack in design, manufacture, supply chain and user-driven redesign processes’. Over the years, jugaad has become a generic term for any product or action meant to provide a quick solution even if it is not sustainable or potentially harmful. Its depiction in popular culture normalized it, while management experts mainstreamed it much to the chagrin of frugal or grassroots innovators whose works are being dubbed as the Indian jugaad. Some academicians have gone to the extent of calling genuine technological or business innovations – even the Mars Orbiter Mission of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) – as instances of jugaad, which is appalling. It is important to shrug off this image of India being a ‘jugaad nation’, and also the pessimistic narrative saying ‘nothing has happened in India in the past seventy-five years’. Scholars so far have looked at the Indian innovation ecosystem in silos – innovation at the firm or business level and grassroots innovations – or have studied innovations in specific sectors like health or information and communication technologies, nanotechnology and so on. This book attempts to map Indian innovations holistically. How the Book Is Organized The number of innovations included in the book is one hundred but by no means is it an exhaustive list. It covers innovations emanating from both formal institutions and the informal sector, government and non-government organizations, business and industry as well as individuals and groups of people. Some of the innovations deserve longer narration and even full-length books. Some have already been the subject of movies and books. The first chapter is about mega innovations that are usually referred to as ‘revolutions’, which have been critical for progress in food production and communications. A note about the word ‘revolutions’ in the first chapter needs explanation. In the world of technology and innovation, as technology writer Walter Isaacson points, there are no revolutions but evolutions. Yet, we hear about revolutions whenever there is a dramatic change in a particular sector or technology which is transformative in a given period. In India, this started with the Green Revolution and the term ‘revolution’ has remained to refer to any change that has been dramatic and has occurred over a relatively short period. That’s how we have so many ‘revolutions’. For want of better terminology, it is better not to depart from this usage. The first chapter includes seven major innovations that fulfil the criteria discussed here, though there are a few other ‘revolutions’ that figure in thematic chapters.

The rest of the nine chapters have been arranged thematically, and not chronologically or alphabetically. In some chapters, many categories have been clubbed for the sake of convenience. An example is the ninth chapter, which covers innovations in art, cinema, fashion, culture, religion and architecture. A few others could have featured in more than one list as they are intersectoral. In this sense, the categories are not watertight. In any case, each innovation has been dealt with as a stand-alone narrative and need not be read as part of a particular chapter. Each narrative provides the context, origin and core features of the innovation, as well as its dissemination, impact and key people behind it. Barring a few, all the narratives are brief and written in a manner that provides a snapshot of the development. They do touch upon controversies and criticisms but are not to be seen as a critical analysis of the innovation concerned. Despite all their flaws, these innovations remain landmarks in the journey of India. They are contextspecific and judging them in the perspective of the 2020s would not be justified. For more about individual innovations, readers are advised to explore references given at the end of each chapter. The process of innovation and its dissemination is evolutionary, both in the case of innovations coming from institutions and those from individuals. More often, this process involves multiple people at different points of time and in different roles or capacities. In addition, innovations and technologies take shape due to multiple factors and not just technological ones. The factors or parameters involved are social, political, cultural, industrial, economic and so on. Wherever possible, an attempt has been made to bring out major factors at play while discussing innovations and their impact on society. In the same way, key individuals involved in the process have been identified though ‘credit giving’ is a contested territory, and the exact role of people is unclear in many cases. In some cases, work has been done by collaborative teams across institutions. Still, this book throws up several names of many people who have largely remained unsung and ‘uncelebrated’ beyond their niche area of expertise. This list includes plant breeder Benjamin Peary Pal, dairy technologist Harichand Dalaya, veterinarian B.V. Rao, software engineer Narendra Patni, telecom engineer G.B. Meemansi, engineering scientist Manmohan Suri, water expert Cyrus Gaikwad, educationists Tarabai Modak and Anutai Wagh, human rights lawyer Colin Gonsalves, rights activist Aruna Roy, family planning official Dharmendra Kumar Tyagi, scientist Alla Venkata Rama Rao, industrialists Cyrus Poonawala and Yusuf Hamied, virologist T. Jacob John, public health expert Noshir Hormasji Antia, eye specialist Govindappa Venkataswamy, pathologist V. Ramalingaswamy, surgeon Pramod Karan Seth, master craftsman Ramachandra Sharma, palliative care expert M.R. Rajagopal, entrepreneur Sudarshan K. Maini, ex- army officer G.R. Gopinath, internet entrepreneurs Murugavel Janakiraman and Anupam Mittal, lawyer couple Kapila and Nirmal Hingorani, management expert Ravi Matthai, grassroots innovators Arunachalam Muruganantham, Mansukh Bhai Prajapati and Subhas Ola, IIT professor Kiran Seth, designer Devika Bhojwani, forester Kailash Sankhla, retired civil engineer Chewang Norphel, and many others. This is a set of extraordinary Indians who, among several other well-known names like M.S. Swaminathan, Verghese Kurien and Sam Pitroda, have contributed immensely to innovating India. References Gupta, Anil K. Grassroots Innovation: Minds on the Margin Are Not Marginal Minds. New Delhi: Random House India, 2016. Isaacson, Walter. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Li, Peter Ping. Disruptive Innovation in Chinese and Indian Businesses: The Strategic Implications for Local Entrepreneurs and Global Incumbents. New Delhi: Routledge, 2013. Prabhu, Jaideep, and Sanjay Jain. ‘Innovation and entrepreneurship in India: Understanding jugaad’. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 32 (4), 2015: 843–68. Prahalad, Coimbatore Krishna. ‘Bottom of the Pyramid as a Source of Breakthrough Innovations’. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 29 (1), 2012: 6–12. Radjou, Navi, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja. Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Singh, Harbir, Ananth Padmanabhan, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel (eds), India as a Pioneer of Innovation. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017.

The Revolutions When India became a free nation in 1947, it was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural with 85 per cent of its population living in villages and economically dependent on agriculture and traditional vocations. Despite it being an agricultural country, India did not produce enough foodgrains to feed its people, which meant that essential foodgrains had to be imported regularly. India also had a vast population of cattle, but their productivity was abysmal. Milk supplies in cities was a monopoly of colonial-era private dairies. The essential sources of nutrition, such as lentils, fish and eggs, were not accessible for a bulk of the population. In the early years, the focus was on more rapid industrialization and institution-building. In the 1960s, when food shortages became too acute, the focus shifted to attaining self-sufficiency in food production. The Green Revolution and the White Revolution brought dramatic changes in the food output during the 1960s and the 1970s. Other revolutions in the 1980s expanded the food basket to include eggs, fish and vegetable oils. While science-led innovation was a key driver of these revolutions, their success depended on innovative policies to empower farmers as well as strong political will. And all of them were not state-led ideas. For example, the egg revolution was ushered in through an innovative marketing strategy to ensure price stability and was led by small farmers, while the White Revolution was a cooperative movement. The seeds for the IT revolution were sown by private players, and shaped by market forces. The communication revolution started with research in the government sector but it got widely disseminated through private industry participation and the unique model of phone kiosks. The revolutions described in this chapter cover a long period of about four decades – from the 1960s to the 2000s – and have had a great impact on the Indian economy and people in rural as well as urban areas. India is now not just able to meet the needs of its people but is counted among global leaders in respective areas of production.

1. Green Revolution Self-sufficiency in food remains one of the biggest success stories of Independent India and a great example of science-led innovation. When India became free in August 1947, it was not producing enough foodgrains for its people although the population at 300 million was much smaller compared to the present. The memories of the Bengal famine that had claimed 4.3 million lives in 1942–43 were fresh. The partition had made food supplies more precarious as most of the wheat belt became West Pakistan and the rice-growing area East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). The rice supplies from Burma (later Myanmar) had waned when it ceased to be a part of British India a decade earlier. Despite a bulk of the population engaged in agriculture, farming in India was considered traditional and dependent mostly on monsoon rains. The colonial administration had introduced modern techniques to boost the production of exportable cash crops such as jute, cotton, tea and rubber but did not do the same for cereals. As an immediate step to bridge the gap between demand and supply, newly Independent India had to resort to food imports, mainly from America under its international aid programme, while taking steps to increase domestic production. Such imports in 1966 touched a peak of 10 million tonnes, earning India the sobriquet of a nation living on a ship-to-mouth basis. The food supplies came under the famously known PL-480 or Public Law 480 of America. At one point, the country reached a stage where stocks consisted of food only for two weeks, with nothing in transit. All this impelled some commentators to describe India as a country with a ‘begging bowl’. In the late-1960s, something dramatic happened. Wheat production jumped from 12 million tonnes in 1965 to 17 million tonnes in 1968, due to 18,000 tonnes of seeds imported from Mexico. The food production, which was 54.94 million tonnes in 1949–50, gradually rose to 121.03 in 1975–76. The imports progressively declined from 10 million tonnes in 1966–67 to 0.30 million tonnes in 1980–81 and finally ceased in 1985–86. The turnaround from ship-to-mouth to achieving a comfortable buffer stock and even beginning modest exports was a landmark development. Despite the fact that India’s population has grown to more than four times of what it was in 1947, India can now produce enough food for its people. The foodgrain production in India in 2018 was over 283 million tonnes, with rice and wheat accounting for 80 per cent of it. The Green Revolution was the result of a strategy that combined the application of new farm technology with strong political will, bold institutional changes, administrative reforms and the unprecedented outreach for the transfer of technology to farmers. The scientific input came in the form of HYVs of seeds, a modern system of irrigation and input of fertilizers (what was then called the ‘chemicalization of agriculture’). The functioning of the agriculture research and extension system was revamped by injecting new talent and expertise. The key innovation was HYVs. The first one for wheat – a Mexican variety – was tested in India in 1962 and the first HYV for rice in 1964. They were introduced nationally during the growing season of 1965–66. In addition, new varieties of maize, sorghum and pearl millet were tested. The ‘Wheat Revolution’ was the first to occur in Punjab which already had preconditions like landownership of farmers and rural electrification necessary for new technologies to take root and spread rapidly. At the heart of the Green Revolution were dwarf and semi- dwarf varieties of wheat and rice – with the use of the Norin 101 dwarfing gene that originated in Japan –

which give high yields and responded well to irrigation and fertilizers. Traditional wheat varieties are tall and tend to topple over if grown in highly fertile soil, but the dwarf varieties do not. A quantum jump in food production was reported during the decade of 1965–75, but the groundwork to revive agriculture had begun a decade earlier. The Intensive Agricultural Development Programme had been launched and agriculture universities were established in several states – on the lines of land-grant universities of the US with help from American educators. An example is the agriculture university at Pant Nagar modelled after the University of Illinois. The Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR), which was established as the Imperial Council of Agriculture Research in 1929, was reorganized. Another British-era outfit, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), was upgraded into a university offering postgraduation and PhD degrees in agriculture in 1958. All these pre-1965 steps helped develop capabilities in modern agriculture research and extension, coming in handy for the impending technological leap. Key Players Along with institutional reforms, the introduction of new technologies of HYVs and chemical fertilization, what played an important role was a shift in the political economy after Nehru’s death in 1964. The drive for agrarian transformation during the Nehru era was based on land reforms, cooperatives and building political institutions of self-governance like gram panchayats. The approach changed when Lal Bahadur Shastri became the prime minister and appointed C. Subramaniam as the food and agriculture minister. Subramaniam, who was inducted into the central government by Nehru as the minister for steel and heavy industry, was a votary of using science in order to increase production. As the agriculture minister, he applied the same ideas of using technology to boost production as he did in the steel ministry, and thought it necessary to link agricultural production with economic incentives. This led to the crafting of policy that assured a Minimum Support Price (MSP) to farmers and the system of government procurement of foodgrains to serve the twin purpose of incentivizing farmers and boosting production. Subramaniam could bring about these changes despite opposition from within the government as well as the Congress Party because of the support of Prime Minister Shastri and his successor, Indira Gandhi. Political support was also crucial for the import of fertilizers as it involved significant amounts of scarce foreign exchange, which was opposed by the Ministry of Finance and the Planning Commission. The introduction of HYV seeds faced resistance from a scientist within the ICAR as well as influential members of the Planning Commission arguing that these seeds were not suited to Indian conditions. Resisting the resistance within the system were scientists – Benjamin Peary Pal, M.S. Swaminathan and others like Dilbagh Singh Athwal. Pal was an internationally known plant breeder and director of IARI when Subramaniam appointed him as the director-general of ICAR – a post which until then used to be held by an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer. Pal had worked in the area of wheat genetics and breeding for several years, had developed rust-resistant wheat varieties and established a germplasm bank for wheat. As head of ICAR, he introduced the concept of all-India coordinated projects for wheat and other crops. This multilocation testing methodology helped accelerate the pace of varietal identification and release. Results from the project gave scientists the confidence to recommend the import of seeds of the Mexican semi-dwarf varieties, Lerma Roja 64 A and Sonora 64, in 1965.

The effort of selecting appropriate HYVs according to different agroclimatic zones in India was led by M.S. Swaminathan who was head of the genetics division at IARI. Earlier, he had worked on indica–japonica rice crosses at the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack. While doing so, he realized that the plant type should be tailored to be functionally responsive to external application of fertilizers and that the height of plants should be reduced without reducing the length of the grain-bearing panicle. The search for suitable dwarfing genes that could achieve this led him in 1962 to the work of Norman E. Borlaug in the Office of Special Studies, a collaborative programme between the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation. The collaboration later took the shape of the International Centre for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) in Mexico, with Borlaug as its first director. The Borlaug–Swaminathan duo worked closely, with Borlaug visiting India several times beginning in March 1963. Borlaug is widely credited for ushering in the early Green Revolution in Latin America and Asia, which won him the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1970. After the imported Mexican seeds, IARI scientists developed new varieties that carried forward the Green Revolution in the decades that followed. Dilbagh Singh Athwal, head of plant breeding at the Punjab Agriculture University, worked closely with Borlaug and Swaminathan and led the ‘Wheat Revolution’ in Punjab. He developed a new variety of amber- coloured wheat, Kalyansona, which became very popular in the state because it was more suitable for making chapatis. The success of the focused strategy to boost food production by addressing plant disease, soil fertility and irrigation inspired many other countries and also spawned ‘revolutions’ in other sectors in India, notwithstanding the criticism of the approach and problems caused by the overuse of chemicals. It was because of the Green Revolution that India turned into a bread basket, brushing aside the tag of a ‘begging bowl’. 2. White Revolution Amul is perhaps one of the best-known and trusted dairy brands in India. Much of the credit for such a high recall of the brand perhaps goes to its cheeky and topical outdoor ads with the taglines ‘Utterly Butterly Delicious’ and ‘Taste of India’. The ad series that features the chubby Amul girl is officially the longest running advertising campaigns in the world. Few would, however, know that Amul is an acronym – for Anand Milk Union Limited. It was coined as a given name for the original entity called the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union Limited. It was this cooperative, established in 1946, that seeded the milk revolution in Independent India, which is better known as the White Revolution. From being a marginal milk producer in the middle of the last century with no modern dairy industry, India is today the world’s largest milk producer and is counted as one of the largest dairy markets globally. Milk production in 1951 was 17 million tonnes with a per capita availability of milk of 124 grams per day. In 2019, it was 187 million tonnes, with per capita availability touching 394 grams per day. This transformation is attributed to the success of what is known as the Anand pattern of farmers’ cooperatives and unrolling of an initiative called Operation Flood that ran from 1970 to 1996 in three phases. In a way, Amul is a by-product of India’s freedom struggle. The Kaira farmers’ cooperative was formed to break the monopoly of a private dairy, Polson, which was the sole supplier of milk to the government-owned Bombay Milk Scheme in the colonial period. Farmers were being exploited by private dairies and middlemen

in the supply chain. To oppose their exploitation by a Britishbacked dairy, farmers went on strike. As a way out, Congress leader Vallabhbhai Patel advised farmers to organize themselves into a cooperative and take control of the procurement, processing and marketing of milk. He deputed Morarji Desai to guide Kaira farmers in this effort. Desai chose Tribhuvandas K. Patel, a young Gandhian, as the first chairman of the cooperative which began with a handful of farmers in December 1946. Patel, who became the deputy prime minister a year later, got the central government to lease a part of a World War-era government creamery that existed in Anand, to the Kaira dairy. That’s how the first cooperative of milk producers began. Kaira is known as Kheda now. The innovation that spawned the White Revolution was twofold: making farmers partners in cooperatives in a way that they became shareholders in the profits of dairies and managing cooperatives as a professional business enterprise with a board elected by producers. Another innovation was the adaptation and application of available dairy technology for Indian conditions. Given the fact that milk is a perishable item and that milk production fluctuates with seasons, Patel and professionals like Dr Verghese Kurien, realized early on that cooperative unions must have a milk powder plant. This was a technological challenge as a powder production technology in dairying countries like New Zealand and Australia was tailormade for cow milk, whereas most of the milk in India came from buffaloes. This hurdle was overcome by suitably adapting powder production plants for buffalo milk. Understanding and breaking into urban markets was also tough for cooperative unions. On one hand, milk unions had to assure an attractive price to farmers, and on the other, they had to capture urban markets. In 1948, the Kaira cooperative had 432 members and handled about 5,000 litres of milk every day. The number has grown to 7.64 lakh members and the total milk collected every day is 33 lakh litres. Extending the Anand model of cooperatives beyond Gujarat faced stiff resistance from vested interests such as private dairies, contractors, middlemen as well as state bureaucracies and political leadership. This occurred even though Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri wanted Kurien to replicate the Anand model in other states. He also approved the establishment of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in 1965 for this purpose. The dairy industry in most parts of the country was in private hands and cattle were being moved to private dairies on city peripheries as the demand for milk grew in urban areas. This led to fouling of the environment in big cities and also premature deaths of a large number of calves due to starvation and slaughtering of animals when they went dry. Still, the NDDB could not make any headway. States were not ready to finance cooperative dairies and the NDDB did not have any funds. An opportunity arose in the late 1960s when the European Union (then EEC) reported a surplus of milk powder and butter oil and wished to donate the same to any large milk-consuming country. The NDDB saw an opportunity in this and negotiated with EEC and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to gift surplus skimmed milk powder and butter oil to it. The idea was to flood the Indian market with milk made from skimmed milk powder to develop a market and use the revenue thus generated to fund cooperative dairies. The initiative launched in 1970 was given the name Operation Flood. It led to the creation of a National Milk Grid and eventually became a self-sustaining network of milk cooperative unions owned by farmers, just like Anand, by 1985. In 2019, the cooperative milk unions together covered 1.9 lakh village dairy cooperative societies, with a cumulative membership of 1.69 crore milk producers. The sales of liquid milk reached 354.53 lakh litres per day. Key Players The journey from Anand to the pan-India White Revolution spanning half a century was driven by the triumvirate of Tribhuvandas Patel, Verghese Kurien and Harichand Dalaya, and of course, the farmers of India.

Patel organized farmers, Kurien provided managerial and technical help, and Dalaya was the technology brain behind Amul. Patel was a Gandhian and a Congress party leader in Kaira when Morarji Desai picked him to organize the farmers. He travelled from village to village explaining to illiterate farmers the concept and benefits of cooperatives. He particularly targeted small landholders, landless farmers and other marginalized people who owned just one or two cattle. The cooperative was formed but it had no infrastructure for milk processing. The part of the creamery that the central government reluctantly leased to the cooperative had equipment that hardly worked. The other part of the creamery was used by the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI). No technical help was available to the cooperative, so, Patel would often turn to Kurien who had been deputed to work in the NDRI. He had obtained his master’s degree in dairy engineering from Michigan State University (MSU) with a government scholarship and was under a bond to work in the government. Kurien was disinterested in the government institute and wanted to leave Anand, but Patel convinced him to stay on and join the fledgling cooperative as the general manager. It was this collaboration between Patel and Kurien that gave birth to a new wave of transformation in the dairy business across India over the next two decades. Kurien remained in the driving seat of the White Revolution, while Patel organized farmers and Dalaya brought in new technology to make Amul diversify into a range of dairy products. Dalaya had studied with Kurien at MSU and was his close friend. He belonged to a family engaged in dairying in Karachi and had moved to India after the partition. When Kurien joined the Kaira cooperative in 1950, he wanted Dalaya to join him as he was a great dairy technologist. Dalaya’s first breakthrough was the technology to make milk powder from buffalo milk. He then enabled Amul to make other dairy products from buffalo milk – cheese, baby food, condensed milk, chocolate and so on. Kurien’s philosophy was that the government should remain out of the dairy business, and also cooperative dairies should be run professionally. Even as the chairman of the NDDB he never took any salary from the government and sent in his resignation letter every time a new government took over at the centre. Kurien befriended politicians, bureaucrats and diplomats in international bodies (FAO, UNICEF) and harnessed these contacts for the benefit of cooperatives. At times, this closeness with top people landed him in controversies. He could convince successive prime ministers, from Nehru onwards, to keep multinational dairy companies out of India while the indigenous industry was developing and was ready to compete. Operation Flood was his idea. It was the largest self-sustaining rural employment programme in India, made India self-sufficient in milk production and the world’s largest milk producer – from being an importer of dairy products – within twenty- five years. 3. Blue Revolution Fish is an integral part of the diet and a major source of nutrition in many parts of the country, particularly in the coastal areas. It is also a source of income for millions of people who fish in the sea and other waterbodies. Over the years, harvesting fish, prawns and shrimps has emerged as a major industry in India. Many of these products are processed, frozen and exported to several countries around the globe. The fish production in India was a mere 0.75 million tonnes in 1950 and that too, was mostly for domestic consumption – only a small quantity of dried fish and shrimp was exported to Sri Lanka and Myanmar. In 2018, the fish production in India had risen close to 13 million tonnes, making India the second largest fish producer in the world and a significant

player in the global markets. Almost half of the fish production in India now is through culture fisheries, which refers to artificial breeding, rearing and harvesting of aqua products (fish, shrimp, prawn, among others) in aquaculture farms. The change is attributed, in large measure, to a package of technological and marketing inputs popularly known as the Blue Revolution. Though initial steps to boost fisheries had been taken soon after the Independence of India in the form of new research stations, the first Blue Revolution package was launched in 1985 as part of the seventh Five Year Plan. The plan specifically targeted improvements in aquaculture by adopting new technologies for fish breeding and rearing as well as marketing and exports. It also sought to organize farmers cooperatives with the setting up of the Fish Farmers’ Development Agencies. Fishing harbours were developed in port cities such as Visakhapatnam, Kochi, Port Blair and Tuticorin. A new research body, the Central Institute for Brackishwater Aquaculture, was established in Chennai to accelerate the production and improvement of various species. Coastal states like Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu aggressively developed shrimp farming. In fact, Nellore in Andhra Pradesh, where the first pilot project for the scientific cultivation of shrimp was initiated in 1988, soon emerged as the ‘Shrimp Capital of India’. Technologies and capacity were also developed for monitoring and addressing disease outbreaks, which is a major problem in commercial aquaculture. Making commercial aquaculture a sustainable and environment-friendly activity is a major challenge, which is why it is the goal of the second Blue Revolution initiative being spearheaded by the National Fisheries Development Board. Key Players The technology for seed production or breeding different fish species was at the heart of the Blue Revolution. It was pioneered by Dr Hiralal Chaudhuri, a senior scientist at the Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute (CIFRI), Kolkata, and later an expert with the UN FAO. He initiated research into the breeding of Indian major carps and in 1957, he achieved a breakthrough with induced breeding of a minor carp, Cirrhinus reba, in captivity. This resulted in the production of spawns within eighteen hours of hatching from eggs. Chaudhuri then extended the technique to other species like mrigal and rohu. Several countries sought his expertise and as an FAO expert, he helped establish breeding and aquaculture projects in many countries. In commemoration of the induced breeding technique developed by Chaudhuri, which led to increasing fish production in Blue Revolution years, the government in 2001 declared 10 July – the day on which Chaudhuri achieved breeding of Cirrhinus reba in 1957 – National Fish Farmers’ Day. 4. Yellow Revolution A colourful countryside always makes an idyllic backdrop for filming love songs in Hindi movies. Some of the songs and sequences become iconic, such as the one in the romantic drama Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, starring Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. It was shot in vast yellow mustard (sarson in Hindi) fields in rural Punjab. Such fields are a common sight in north India, along the national highways, particularly during winter. Cold weather is critical for the growth of mustard and oilseeds harvested in this season yield a high oil content. The song sequence in the 1995 blockbuster, incidentally, may have symbolized the Yellow Revolution, which had reached its peak in the country around the same time. Flowers of oilseed crops like yellow mustard and sunflower turn yellow when they bloom, turning fields into carpets of yellow, reflecting the Yellow Revolution, a term that refers to the boost in oilseeds production in a short period as a result of a targeted initiative called Technology Mission on Oilseeds (TMO) launched in 1986.

Traditionally, India has depended on the import of cooking oils to meet the shortfall in domestic production. Though Indian soils are well suited for growing oilseed crops, these crops remained on the margins for several reasons, including the lack of suitable varieties and price support. Farmers preferred growing wheat and rice as they were more profitable with the availability of inputs and subsidies, particularly during the Green Revolution period. This resulted in a huge demand–supply gap for edible oil at the end of the 1970s. Edible oil accounted for about half of food imports in 1980, costing the exchequer about one billion dollars a year. Against this backdrop, TMO was launched to reduce dependence on imports through an increase in domestic production. The target was to substantially reduce the import of edible oils by the end of the Seventh Plan (March 1990) and to finally achieve self-reliance during the Eighth Plan. Though named a technology mission, TMO was an innovative mix of technological inputs and market interventions. The mission consisted of four micro-missions that focused on crop production technology; post- harvest technology; input and service support; and price support, storage, processing and marketing. The initial thrust was on increasing production of four major oilseed crops – groundnut, mustard, soybean and sunflower. As many as forty new varieties of oilseed crops that yielded four times more than the national average were developed and released by the ICAR. This helped in accelerating production without a corresponding increase in crop area. The second technological input came in the form of better and new technologies for post-harvest methods and processing. National laboratories under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) developed integrated processing technologies, extraction technologies from oilcake and carried out improvements in traditional oil ghanis (cold presses to extract oil from seeds). To reform the marketing and economics of edible oil, an Integrated Policy on Oilseeds Production, Import, Distribution and Pricing was formulated. Farmers were given higher MSPs and high duties were imposed to discourage imports. All this led to diversification into new oilseed crops like soybean and sunflower, along with rapeseed-mustard and groundnut. Within five years, India became self-reliant in edible oils up to 98 per cent. However, the gains could not be sustained for long due to several factors, mainly low international prices and reduction in import duties on edible oils under the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime. By the end of the decade, imports became prominent again, particularly of palmolein oil. TMO was later renamed the Technology Mission on Oilseeds and Pulses and is now called the Integrated Scheme of Oilseeds, Pulses, Oil Palm and Maize. However, given the high domestic demand for edible oil, India is again dependent on imports. Key Players The TMO was one of the technology missions launched during the tenure of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In 1987, he appointed Sam Pitroda as his technology adviser and National Technology Missions were launched to achieve specific goals in each of the critical areas of drinking water, immunization, literacy, oilseeds and telecommunications. As head of the technology missions, Pitroda brought in various ministries and government departments as well as state governments so that mission objectives could be met within tight, fixed time frames. Helping Pitroda in the oilseeds mission was Dr Verghese Kurien, who by then had demonstrated the power of the mission strategy in the dairy sector. Kurien proposed that a market intervention was necessary to boost oilseed production, along with new technology. Also, farmers should be convinced of the benefits of growing oilseeds, and their exploitation by middlemen should be stopped. That’s how the integrated policy on oilseeds was devised. The Department of Agriculture and Cooperation (DAC) was made responsible for the overall management of the oilseeds and oil economy, for maintaining the consumer prices within the price band,

while the NDBB headed by Kurien built up a market intervention stock through imports and procurement of domestic oilseeds/oils. 5. The Egg Revolution Eggs are available everywhere in the country at prices affordable for the poor. One can buy an egg or order an omelette or egg curry at roadside kiosks and dhabas. For many people, eggs are a cheap source of protein and form their basic, wholesome meal in the absence of other sources of nutrition. This was not the case a few decades back when eggs were available, but were not a part of the daily diet of the common man. The price variation from one region to another was too sharp, and prices fluctuated widely. Poultry in the 1960s was a backyard activity for small farmers in rural areas and the egg business in urban areas was controlled by a few powerful groups. Middlemen inflated prices artificially for making profits or for taking advantage of shortages in particular markets. In 2021, eggs are not only available to consumers at affordable rates throughout the year, but India has become the third largest producer of eggs globally. Egg production, which was just 1,780 million in 1960 and 13 billion in 1980, climbed to 103 billion in 2019. The per capita availability of eggs was pretty low at eighteen to nineteen eggs per year in 1980, compared to just four a year in 1960. It now stands at seventy-four per person per year. This transformational change occurred due to innovations in price monitoring and marketing of eggs initiated in the early 1980s, among other factors. The effort was led by the National Egg Coordination Committee (NECC). In the 1960s and 1970s, poultry development was more of a government activity under the Five Year Plan, introducing some new practices and technologies at the behest of international bodies, mainly the FAO. In the third Five Year Plan, the government launched the Intensive Poultry Development Project with help from foreign chicken breeders like Amor Acres, Hi-Bred, Rani Shaver and Uni-Chix. Some 10,000 pure live chicks were imported for government breeding farms from Australia under an international programme called the Freedom from Hunger Campaign. Poultry research centres were also established by the government. In the 1970s, many commercial farms and hatcheries were developed for the production of hybrid layer and broiler chicks. One of the reasons for the low production of eggs in the 1960s was the high cost of maize used as feed for poultry birds. At the beginning of the 1980s, the nascent poultry industry again faced a major crisis with feed prices going up and middlemen not paying a fair price to farmers. This made the business unviable and many farmers stopped production. In any case, the producers were concentrated in the southern and western states. Around this time, a veterinarian and poultry businessman, Banda Vasudev Rao, decided to intervene in the market on behalf of farmers. He started organizing farmers, explained market dynamics and formed a farmers’ cooperative, naming it the NECC, in 1982. He told them to take the business into their own hands and coined the motto: ‘My egg, my price, my life’. Rao’s strategy to minimize the influence of middlemen on the market was simple – impose supply regulation to keep egg prices stable. The NECC worked out a reporting system to monitor egg availability in different regions and states. As soon as signs of shortage were reported, the NECC would tell farmers in surplus areas to rush in supplies. And to prevent surpluses, it made inroads into new markets such as central and east India. This ensured reasonable prices for farmers as well as consumers.

Besides supply regulation and price stabilization, the NECC aggressively marketed eggs to Indian consumers. It launched radio, television and print campaigns with the famous tagline: ‘Sunday Ho Ya Monday, Roz Khao Andey’ featuring prominent celebrities and sports personalities, such as Dara Singh and Sachin Tendulkar. National egg days and egg promotion weeks were organized in different cities when promotion rallies were launched and boiled eggs were distributed free to people. Consumer education was also undertaken and housewives were introduced to egg recipes. For a country perceived to be a vegetarian country, the egg promotion drive was novel although it also attracted some criticism. In the end, it led to a substantial increase in egg consumption in India and, by 2020, about 95 per cent of the eggs consumed in the country were by the 25,000-odd members of the NECC. Key Players In the developmental phase of the poultry industry in India, three experts played a key role – Allan A. McArdle, FAO’s poultry production consultant in India, Dr Earl N. Moore of the US Technical Cooperation Mission and Dr J.N. Panda, India’s first poultry commissioner. Behind the idea of the NECC and its phenomenal success was B.V. Rao, the Indian agriculturalist and founder chairman of the NECC. While pursuing a short-term course at the Andhra Pradesh Agriculture University in the 1960s, he got in touch with Dr Moore who arranged to send him to the US for training in poultry breeding. After his return to India, Rao worked in private breeding farms – Rani Shaver and Arbour Acres – in Pune for some time. He quit the job in 1969 to start his own poultry business with a modest number of 5,000 birds, and later expanded into the hatchery business under the brand name of Venkateshwara Hatcheries. The business grew rapidly in the 1970s with Rao expanding into feed and poultry vaccines as well, but he wanted something more for the industry as a whole. That’s how he started organizing farmers and established the NECC. In 1982, he told India Today that his dream was to develop a fast-food business like McDonald’s, saying that ‘A national fast-food chain will be another way to propagate the egg habit in the country.’ 6. IT Revolution Globally, India is recognized as a major hub for software services and outsourcing of business processes. A large number of Fortune 500 companies farm out their software or IT management functions to Indian companies either directly or through fully owned units in India or intermediary service providers. The business is worth close to 177 billion dollars, with 136 billion dollars coming from exports. The sector employed over 40 lakh people in 2019. This rapid growth of the sector beginning at the turn of the millennium is often referred to as the IT Revolution. The business of outsourcing saw a dramatic rise during this period, bringing India to the fore of the knowledge economy and making it one of the most successful stories of Independent India. The remarkable achievement in software exports and outsourcing of IT-enabled services came at a time when the domestic market was still very small and the penetration of the internet was pretty low. Just a few decades back, India had only a handful of computers and the market was dominated by two multinationals – IBM and ICL since the 1950s. Even in the 1980s, Indian software companies were so small that they could not afford their own computer systems and had had to depend on the computers of clients to develop software for them. In the 1970s, India mainly exported gems, jewellery and leather products. It depended on imports for machinery, computers and electronic products. Exporting a knowledge product, software, or a service was not on the table, though a large number of skilled Indians worked for foreign companies operating in India. In the Western

countries, the technology market was undergoing a shift from mainframe computers to minicomputers and the era of personal computers was about to begin. In mainframe computers, proprietary software came bundled with hardware. With the change in the computer market, operating systems and software products got delinked from hardware. Applications working on mainframe systems had to be migrated to new systems, but such migration was laborious and needed sizeable manpower, which was expensive in the West. It was around this time that the idea of offshoring (foreign firms sending part of their work to India) and outsourcing (foreign companies hiring Indian firms to develop and manage their software) germinated in the minds of some Indian engineers working in the US as well as those in India. The idea was that skilled workers available in India could provide the cost advantage that the US companies were looking for. It was these ingenious engineers and Indian start-ups in the 1970s which pioneered the concept of offshoring/outsourcing which grew into a billion-dollar industry in the next three decades. The change occurred in several waves. To begin with, data in physical form was shipped to India where it was converted into digital form and shipped back – data communication links were practically non-existent. Another dominant form of outsourcing in the 1970s was developing software that helped clients migrate their data from one mainframe to another on minicomputers. Several American minicomputer companies began hiring Indian engineers to work on their systems in India and then using these engineers to work for American clients as well. This introduced Indian companies and engineers to the American market and vice versa. American companies would hire Indian software companies to work at their premises (onsite) or in some cases let them work in India (offsite). Small Indian firms would also send groups of engineers to work with clients, in a trend which came to be known as ‘body shopping’. In the early 1980s, large customers found another cost-effective way of utilizing Indian skills – setting up dedicated software development units in India. CitiBank and Texas Instruments are prime examples of this trend. As confidence grew on both sides, satellite-based data communication became feasible and affordable and economic liberalization eased the situation for Indian firms. The software business grew gradually in the 1990s. The Millennium Bug or Y2K problem opened up more opportunities and the sector saw exponential growth in the 2000s. Another wave was Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) or IT-enabled services, facilitated by faster digital links and the internet. Key Players Several individuals, companies, scientists, officials and government policies at different times helped shape the IT Revolution. In the early 1970s, the business of printing was getting modernized with the introduction of computer-controlled typesetting machines, which were driven by paper or magnetic tapes encoded on offline keyboards. Data that existed in hard copy form was thus being converted into paper tapes using keyboards. It was a manual and laborious process. When Narendra K. Patni, a young engineering and management graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), then working with an academic publisher, saw this process, the idea occurred to him that these tapes can be punched overseas and brought back to America. Large electronic databases were just then being created. Patni seized the opportunity and floated a company, Data Conversion Inc., which started doing the data entry back in India in 1972. This is how Patni started outsourcing work. From data conversion, he soon graduated to developing software for minicomputers and established Patni Computer Systems (PCS) along with his brothers, Gajendra and Ashok. It was PCS that recruited N.R. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani and others who later parted ways with Patni and floated Infosys. While Patni sensed the market opportunity in America, Faqir Chand Kohli of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was scouting for clients in India and abroad beyond the Tata group companies under which TCS was originally established. Kohli was also an MIT graduate who started his career with Tata Electric Company before he moved to TCS. His first overseas breakthrough came with Burroughs, which gave TCS a contract to develop

operating system software for its new series. TCS engineers could develop the software working on ICL machines in Bombay; the software could be used on the Burroughs platform with the help of an advanced software filter they had developed. For Burroughs, this opened up a new line of business – they could convince existing users of other machines to migrate to Burroughs without any difficulty. The two companies later formed a joint venture – Tata Burroughs Limited (TBL), which, along with TCS, became a major software company in the 1980s. The 1970s also saw the birth of Indian technology companies such as DCM Data Products – a part of the DCM group. Vinay Bharat Ram had started this to make electronic calculators in the late 1960s and then got into the microcomputer segment in the mid-1970s. Shiv Nadar and Arjun Malhotra were among the sales and marketing team of DCM Data Products. Nadar left the company along with a team of engineers, pretty much like Narayana Murthy did in PCS, and floated his own company called Microcomp, to sell calculators initially. He then roped in the Uttar Pradesh State Electronics Corporation to launch a joint venture – Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL) – competing directly with DCM and eventually leaving it behind to emerge as a market leader in the 1980s. HCL was the first Indian IT company to float an overseas unit – first in Singapore and then America where it began providing onsite software services to its clients. HCL America even registered ‘offsourcing’ as its trademark. The pioneers in offshoring of backroom operations were CitiBank, American Express, SwissAir and British Airlines in the 1990s. 7. Communication Revolution We live in an era of communication in which the availability of phones is ubiquitous in both urban and rural areas in India. It has taken several decades for the country to reach this stage. In 1947, India had just one lakh phones for a population of 340 million. This translated into roughly one telephone for every 3,400 Indians. Most of these phones were in big cities like Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta, and a bulk of them in government offices. The connectivity in rural areas was almost zero. The telephone connectivity was poor until the 1980s – the national waiting list in 1987 stood at 8.42 lakh and it took three to four years for one to get a telephone connection. Only 3 per cent of India’s 600,000 villages were connected to the telephone network. An indigenously developed technology triggered a Communication Revolution in the 1990s, making access to a telephone a reality for millions of Indians in rural areas. Together with the introduction of mobile telephony by the end of the century, waiting lists became a thing of the past. By 2011, there was a phone for every Indian. The rural telecom scene underwent a metamorphosis with the rural telephone exchange, which was developed by a newly created entity, the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), in 1986. India had begun developing an electronic switching system soon after Bell Telephone Laboratories announced commercial trials of the world’s first such telephone exchange in the 1960s. A 100-line electronic switch was developed and demonstrated in November 1973. Subsequently, a 1000-line exchange called Stored Program Controlled No. 1 Exchange was also developed. But these exchanges remained as research projects, as the government opted for the easy route of importing telecom switches or exchanges. These exchanges based on crossbar technology were not suitable for Indian conditions because of the high call volume. In smaller towns and rural areas, they would often break down when the temperature rose or air conditioning stopped due to frequent breakdowns in electricity supplies. The digital switch developed by C-DOT was based on low power consuming CMOS circuits and could function in temperatures up to 45 degrees and 80 per cent humidity without air conditioning. It could also handle high call volumes.

The telephone switches developed by C-DOT – rural telephone exchange (RAX), trunk automatic exchange (TAX) and main automatic exchange (MAX) – ranging from 400 to 40,000 lines were deployed in rural and urban areas. In one go, the archaic telephone system was modernized with a technology developed specifically for Indian conditions. Unlike government projects which took decades, C-DOT could do it in a limited time frame and budget – thirty-six months with a budget of `36 crore. This was because of its innovative management structure and techniques. To keep it free from government rules and regulations, it was formed as an autonomous scientific society on the lines of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). Its core engineering and technical talent were drawn from TIFR as well as the Telecom Research Centre (TRC). The project was successful, despite opposition from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and intense lobbying by telecom multinationals. Once the technology was developed, C-DOT deliberately kept its licensing terms liberal and gave away the technology to as many private firms to counter pressure from foreign companies. For the first time, the state funded research to develop technology and it was transferred to the private sector for manufacturing without any fee. The technology was thus disseminated widely in India, and across several developing countries. In India, over 30,000 C-DOT exchanges totalling about 25 million telephone lines were installed and operational in the field in two decades. Key People A rural telephone exchange based on modern technology was the brainchild of Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda – popularly known as Sam Pitroda – who was named as the technology adviser to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1984. Pitroda had not seen or used a telephone till he reached the age of twenty-one. He was acutely aware of the poor telephone system in India and wanted to do something to improve the same, while he was away in America working for a telecom company, GTE. He worked on a digital telephone exchange and got nearly thirty US patents while in GTE. In 1974, he launched his own company, Wescom Switching, which was taken over by Rockwell International in 1979 for $40 million. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi formed a panel in 1981 to examine how the telecom system in India could be modernized, Pitroda made a presentation to the committee emphasizing that India should go in for digital exchanges. The idea took the shape of C-DOT when Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister in 1984. Pitroda did not join the government and took a token salary of one rupee. G.B. Meemansi, who had worked on telecom research projects in the TRC, was made the executive director of C-DOT. About 200 young engineers worked in the Bangalore (Bengaluru) and Delhi offices, and delivered the exchange in a mission mode, while Pitroda ensured technical help and flow components from America. References Aneja, R.P., K.V.S.M. Krishna, S.J. Phansalkar, and V.P. Gulati. Oilseed and Vegetable Oil Economy of India: Sectoral Policy Issues. Anand: Institute of Rural Management Anand, 1995. Annual Report, 2018–19. National Dairy Development Corporation. Chandel, B.S., and D. Rama Rao. ‘Investment in oilseeds research in India’. Economic and Political Weekly, 38 (43), 2003: 4618–22.

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Food, Water and Sanitation As the White Revolution was shaping up in the late 1960s, Indian farmers needed tools for spreading its progress. Chief among the tools needed was a tractor suitable for small landholdings. All available versions were based on designs imported from developed countries where the average landholding was large. In the same way, pumps imported for drawing underground water would often break down because they were designed for family gardens in Europe and not meant to be used as community pumps. Such needs of communities gave birth to innovations like the Swaraj tractor and the Mark II deep well pump. These products took a long time to come to the market but they succeeded. While the food revolution helped increase production, the country still faced problems of hunger and malnutrition. Mechanisms such as ‘Food for Work’ and the Integrated Child Development Services scheme (ICDS) had to be innovated to ensure access to food for specific groups such as undernourished children and landless labourers in drought-affected areas. These innovations emerged from civil society and communities but were eventually adopted as government schemes. Programmes like the ICDS and Midday Meal schemes not only helped address malnutrition but also were critical for boosting primary education. The Sulabh model of sanitation filled another gap in basic human needs along with food and water. It is another example of an idea that emanated outside the government, but gave a new direction to a major government programme. The urge to provide additional avenues to farmers in the form of post-harvest technologies helped in seeding a new industry of ready-mixes or instant foods. The innovations discussed in this chapter emanated in the 1960s and 1970s but continue to impact millions of Indians in the twenty-first century. 8. The Swaraj Tractor

A tractor is perhaps the most popular symbol of agriculture technology. Tractors tilling vast farmlands along the highways and tractors with trolleys carrying people and material on village roads is a common sight. At the time of Independence, however, a tractor was a rare sight in India. Most agricultural operations were manual. In 1950–51, the whole country had only 9,000 tractors, which translated into seven tractors per one lakh hectares of the gross cropped area. All the tractors in use were imported – since the demand was low, companies did not manufacture agricultural machinery locally. With the advent of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, the demand for tractors picked up dramatically and Indian companies along with their foreign collaborators began manufacturing tractors in good numbers. By 1960–61, the number of tractors in India rose to 31,000. More imports were allowed from the USSR, the eastern bloc countries and Canada to meet the growing demand in the 1960s. While imports were a drain on already scarce foreign exchange, it was also felt that India needed tractors of lesser horsepower as a majority of farmers had small landholdings and all the tractors being imported and manufactured in India were of 25 horsepower (hp) and above. An innovative idea – a 20-hp tractor designed and developed by an Indian research laboratory and a public sector company – changed the scenario in the 1970s. The small tractor, aptly named Swaraj to signify freedom from imports, was developed by a newly established national laboratory – the Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute (CMERI), Durgapur – working under the CSIR, along with another specially created public sector unit, Punjab Tractors Ltd (PTL). Sensing the need for small-sized indigenous tractors suitable for farmers with small holdings, the lab started working on a 20-hp tractor in 1965. The design team decided to leverage engineering expertise available within the country to address challenges in engine development, transmission and manufacture of the chassis. A diesel engine from Kirloskar Oil Engines Ltd was modified for the tractor, while a single-level automatic depth-cum-control hydraulic system was developed afresh. Gears required for transmission of the 20-hp engine were available but other components needed for transmission had to be fabricated. The prototypes developed at CMERI were tested at the Central Farm Machinery Training and Testing Station at Budni in Madhya Pradesh, and also in fields in Punjab. For converting the prototype into an industrial design and taking it to the production stage, the lab got into a novel partnership with PTL. Instead of adopting the conventional ‘transfer of technology’ mode, CMERI deputed its entire design team to PTL to work on further development and adaptation of the innovation as well as to participate in the implementation process. PTL developed ancillary units in Punjab for the supply of components – and Swaraj was finally launched in 1974. Swaraj became a success in the already crowded tractor market in the 1970s. All existing tractor companies, including public sector Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT), had foreign collaborators and some of them had been in the market for several years. The innovation played a great role in the deeper penetration of Green Revolution technologies in the 1970s and the ’80s and opened up a new segment in the market for agriculture machinery. Despite long delays, opposition from within the central government and a rather lukewarm response from the CSIR leadership, the project was pursued with entrepreneurial zeal and taken to a logical end by project teams. Key People The idea of introducing small tractors for Indian farmers to take full advantage of new hybrid varieties of wheat and rice cropped up in the mid-1960s. The central government in 1965 proposed to get technical and financial help for manufacturing small tractors from the Soviet Union. It was among the proposals discussed during the visit of an economic mission led by Ashok Mehta, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. The Soviets declined to take up the tractor proposal but suggested India could get help from Czechoslovakia. Manmohan Suri, director of CMERI, who was a member of the delegation, suggested to Mehta that India had enough

engineering and design expertise to develop such a tractor on its own. Companies in India were already assembling and manufacturing tractors with horsepower ranging from 22 to 50. When Suri joined CMERI, he was already known for his inventions and engineering design skills, which he had developed while working at the Railway Design and Standards Organization (RDSO). At CMERI, he took up projects for industry. For designing and fabricating a tractor, he put together a team of motivated young researchers and engineers. Despite hiccups and a lack of support from the government (which approved Czech technology for HMT), Suri kept the tempo up. Chandra Mohan, who also came from RDSO, was head of the production engineering division at CMERI. He continued the development work after Suri left the lab in 1968. It was Suri and Chandra Mohan who gave the name Swaraj to their creation. In 1970, the Punjab State Industrial Development Corporation showed interest in manufacturing the tractor, and established a new company, PTL, and chose Chandra Mohan to head it. Suri’s company, M.M. Suri Associates, was drafted as a consultant for the PTL project. Thus Suri, Chandra Mohan and PTL forged a unique partnership to deliver an innovative commercial product. 9. India Mark II Deep Well Pump Availability of and access to safe drinking water have been recognized a basic human right. It is also a health issue as unsafe drinking water is known to cause several water-borne diseases. Traditionally, people in rural areas in India have depended on open wells. In many drought-prone and hard rock regions, however, this is not a reliable option as open wells dry up in summer. That’s why almost every Indian village now has a handpump or borewell to draw water from the ground, even in hard rock areas. Handpumps are visible even in urban areas that lack access to the piped water supply. The ubiquitous handpump has a name – India Mark II deep well pump – and this innovation has made the most significant contribution to addressing the water problem for millions of people in India as well as across the developing world in the past half a century. The origin of this humble engineering innovation goes back to the 1960s when droughts and famines were frequent in India. In 1966, Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh experienced famine, causing a shortage of drinking water and food in villages. The central government sought help from voluntary bodies and international agencies to address the situation. Some non-governmental organizations working in Maharashtra suggested the use of the compressed air drilling technique to dig borewells and pump the water up from great depths. The UNICEF helped by airlifting drilling rigs to accelerate ground digging for water. Hundreds of borewells were dug within a short period. This demonstrated the use of borewells as viable sources for drinking water supply on a large scale. The emergency measure of using pneumatic drilling rigs to dig borewells got transformed into a mainstream national drinking water supply programme. Hundreds of borewells were dug with the help of UNICEF in hard rock areas in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan in the early 1970s. However, when UNICEF in 1974 conducted a survey of borewells it had drilled, it found that 75 per cent of them were not in operation at any given time. The problem was that handpumps made of cast iron broke down often and needed regular maintenance. These pumps were based on ‘family’ pumps used in America and Europe, whereas in India they were used by a community. Family use would mean daily usage of just thirty minutes, while a village pump was meant for use by hundreds of people every single day. This insight led to the development of the Mark II pump which could withstand community usage for ten hours and more. The design of the Mark II handpump drew its inspiration from some indigenous pumps in use in Maharashtra, such as the Sholapur and Jalna pumps as well as a Coimbatore pump in use in Tamil Nadu. All these were designed for use by the community, rather than individual families. Though several thousand of them were in use, there was no standardization and they could not be manufactured on a mass scale. Drawing from the experience of these pumps, UNICEF decided to develop a professionally engineered pump suitable for Indian

needs. The design support came from CMERI, Durgapur, while the prototypes were manufactured by Richardson & Cruddas (a Mumbai-based public sector engineering company). India Mark II was ready in 1977 and was field tested for one year. The handpump could be easily mass-produced with basic workshops and using materials and components available in the country. Sturdy, reliable and easy to operate, it could withstand careless and rough handling. It could function without breaking down for at least one year and be capable of drawing water from borewells with static water levels up to 30 metres. The technology was then disseminated to private companies based on standards developed by the Bureau of Indian Standards. In addition, unique approaches such as training and employing local youths as mechanics were taken to ensure maintenance. All these measures paid off and by 1982, the production of Mark II handpumps reached 100,000 per year. By 1984, over 600,000 pumps had been installed and by 1995, some 2.3 million of them were functioning all over the country. Mark II has also been exported to dozens of countries in Asia and Africa. Key People The Sholapur pump had been developed by Oscar Carlsson, a Swedish engineer working with the Sholapur Well Service, while the Jalna pump was developed by Cyrus Gaikwad who worked with the War and Want Project. The UNICEF team was led by Ken Mcleod, an Australian engineer. T.S. Kannan and M.A. Krishnamurty from Richardson & Cruddas, and M.V. Maheshwaran from CMERI played a key role in developing the final version of Mark II. 10. Midday Meal Scheme Providing cooked meals to children during the lunch recess in schools may not enthuse parents and kids in metropolitan cities, but this simple idea has proved to be a gamechanger for millions of children in rural and semi-urban areas since it was first introduced in a small way about seven decades ago. The Midday Meal Scheme is considered the world’s largest child nutrition programme implemented in schools. In 2020, the scheme covered 12 crore children studying in 11.4 lakh schools across the country, with the government spending over `17,000 crore on it. The average cost per meal comes to `6.64 and `9.59 for students of primary and upper primary classes, respectively. Despite occasional media reports on malfunctioning, corruption and controversies over the menu, the scheme remains a stellar example of the social welfare approach to address the twin problem of malnutrition and poor attendance in schools. The practice of providing cooked meals to children in schools was prevalent during the pre-Independence era in two provinces – the Madras Presidency and the princely state of Travancore. Cooked meals were provided to children in schools run by the municipal corporation in Madras in 1923. After Independence, the credit for introducing a universal midday meal scheme goes to K. Kamaraj, the second chief minister of Tamil Nadu. It was introduced on a trial basis in 1956 and subsequently extended to the entire state, as part of reforms in the education sector. It was a strategy to reduce the dropout rate as well as improve the nutritional status of children. In the initial phase, it covered 20 lakh children in primary schools across the state.

In 1982, Chief Minister M.G. Ramachandran relaunched the programme as the ‘Nutritious Noon Meal Scheme’ covering 56 lakh children in 32,000 elementary schools and also child welfare centres. Later it was universalized to include schools in urban areas as well. The idea was to provide a nutritious free meal of 400- odd calories every day to children between five and fourteen years (then extended to children of two years and upwards). It was fully funded by the state government, with additional revenues generated through the relaxation of the prohibition policy. The scheme was criticized for being populist by experts and even the Planning Commission, but soon, the nutrition intervention led to improvements in enrolment as well as attendance. In 1995, the central government led by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao adopted the scheme and rolled it out as the National Programme for Nutrition Support to Primary Education. In this programme, the central government provided funds for buying foodgrains, setting up kitchens and utensils for cooking as well as for paying the wages of cooks. It is implemented through local bodies such as gram panchayats, parent–teacher bodies, self- help groups of women and voluntary agencies. In November 2001, the Supreme Court directed all the state governments to provide a cooked meal to children with a minimum content of 300 calories and 8–12 grams of protein on each day of school for a minimum of 200 days. The implementation of the midday meal scheme was later made part of the National Food Security Act. The midday meal scheme was innovative for many reasons, as several evaluations and audits have shown over the years. It is a motivation for poor people to send their children to school and for children to remain in school. This helps in enrolment as well as retention of students in schools. The cooked meals with their high nutrient value, along with eggs or bananas, helps improve the nutrition level of children. Good health means children don’t fall sick, they come to school regularly and have a better capacity to absorb the teaching, all resulting in better educational outcomes. The school meal also has a social fallout as sitting together and sharing a meal melts class and caste barriers. Notwithstanding problems in implementation and variation from state to state, the scheme has been able to fulfil these broad objectives. Key Players The chief ministership of K. Kamaraj in Tamil Nadu, beginning in 1954, was marked by radical reforms in the education sector. It is said that once, when Kamaraj was travelling in the rural areas of Tirunelveli district, he came across a boy herding cattle. He asked the boy why he was not at school and the boy’s reply was: ‘Who will give me food if I go to school?’ It was this reply that perhaps gave birth to the idea of noon meals in schools to the chief minister who was vigorously promoting the spread of primary school education in the state then. He had mandated that every village with a population of 300 should have a primary school, but few parents opted to send their children to school, for they needed more hands to help them at home and in fields. A midday meal helped address this problem. The success of the scheme in Tamil Nadu drew national and international attention. In addition to the meal, children were provided free uniforms, footwear, notebooks, scholarships and a housing facility for teachers so that they could stay in the villages. When M.G. Ramachandran became the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, he relaunched the midday meal scheme as the Chief Minister’s Nutritious Meal Scheme in 1980. Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, who is better known for economic liberalization and pro-market policies, was behind the idea of expanding the welfare scheme across the country. 11. Ready-mixes for Indian Foods

It is often said that Indian food habits are changing with ready-to-eat, ready-to-cook and processed food products gaining popularity. At the same time, the appetite for traditional Indian foods – be it snacks like namkeens (savouries), cooked food like idli or sweets like gulab jamun – has not diminished. The demand for traditional food items which are ready to cook or eat is growing both in India and among Indians abroad. With new food processing and food preservation technologies becoming available, the range of such food items in the market has grown beyond namkeens and sweets and covers even curries and rice dishes like pulao and biryani. In the years after India’s Independence, the food processing industry was limited to small atta chakkis for grinding wheat, rice mills and oil ghanis to extract oil from seeds. The increase in food production in the 1960s led to the development of post-harvest technologies by national research labs and the food processing industry took root. One such technology – instant or ready-mix food – developed by the Mysore-based Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI) triggered the convenience or instant food revolution and a major change in Indian kitchens in the 1970s. The instant food revolution started with ready-mixes for idli and gulab jamun. The preparation of these food items, like several other traditional ones, involves several steps like soaking the grains, wet grinding and allowing fermentation. In addition, spices and other ingredients have to be added in the right proportion and time for desired taste. All this involves a lot of labour and drudgery. Instant mixes did away with drudgery yet gave the satisfaction of homemade food. Ready-mixes needed no wet grinding or overnight soaking, and one did not require special ingredients like khoya (evaporated milk solids) in the case of gulab jamuns or jalebis. The instant mixes contain cereals, pulses and other ingredients, along with specific shortening and leavening agents. Encouraged by the success of initial offerings, CFTRI developed instant mixes for dosa, vada, rasam, sambhar, halwa and so on, spawning a new industry. The first set of mixes – for idli, gulab jamun and jalebi – were launched in the market in 1963 by a new company, Gits Food Products based in Mumbai. In the initial years, 40 per cent of the company’s products were exported. The company was started by two entrepreneurs – H.Z. Gilani and A.K. Tejani, the company getting its name from the initials of the two founders. They worked with CFTRI to fine-tune the instant mix technology. The lab subsequently disseminated the instant mix technology for a range of Indian foods to hundreds of companies across the country. It also developed machines for making idlis, dosas, laddus, chapatis and other food items for catering units, canteens and sweet shops. For example, all steps in the idli-making process – batter dispersion, depositing on pans, steaming and scooping of ready idlis – are automated. 12. Food for Work For urban people, food for work may connote food one takes for lunch at the workplace, but for millions of the poor, it means food that they take from the workplace in payment for the day’s labour. Food for work means accepting foodgrains as daily wages instead of cash. The idea is to provide employment to the poor during times of hardship and pay them in kind. As part of structured programmes, employment-giving government agencies provide food as part of wages for unskilled labour. The logic is that such transfer of food is more likely to be used for the benefit of the entire household than equivalent cash wages. The food earned as wages can supplement the food resources of the family and free up available resources to be spent for other needs of the family. It may also increase a household’s net food consumption and perhaps nutrition level as well. The concept has existed in the colonial rule as part of relief measures undertaken during times of famine. It was implemented on a large scale for the first time as part of the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) in Maharashtra in 1978. Wages were paid partly as foodgrains for those getting work under the EGS and in the first year, 64,000 tonnes of wheat were distributed as wages. Under an employment assurance scheme called the

Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana launched in 2001, 50 lakh tonnes of foodgrains were provided every year. The scheme involved giving 5 kilograms of foodgrains per man-day to workers as part of wages. In addition, the storage capacity of tanks maintained by local bodies was augmented in each panchayat for increasing availability of water for drinking, irrigation and other purposes. The idea subsequently led to a pan-India scheme called the National Food for Work Programme (NFWP) in 2004. The programme was a result of a series of directives from the Supreme Court from May 2001 onwards in public interest litigations filed on starvation deaths that had occurred in Rajasthan and Orissa. The petitioners had argued that the central and state governments were responsible for the situation because people had died due to starvation despite the availability of a large amount of grains in buffer stock with the government agencies. The court agreed that the government was obliged to provide food to people when they were unable to feed themselves. This resulted in the formulation of various programmes for food security, including the food for work scheme. The NFWP was targeted at 150 of the most backward districts across the country. Anyone willing to do unskilled manual work needing daily wage employment could benefit from it. District collectors were tasked with the implementation and supervision of the programme. People were given vouchers which they could produce at the Public Distribution Scheme (PDS) outlets and collect foodgrains. Once the ‘right to food’ was implemented under the Mahatma Gandhi Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the food for work programme was subsumed in it. One of the major criticisms of food for work schemes was faulty implementation and leakages. Contractors would underpay labour, insert fictitious names in registers and make false claims of foodgrains for public works that were not executed or only partly finished. 13. Integrated Child Development Scheme During the 2020 lockdown when schools were closed down, several education technology startups launched mobile apps with many specifically targeted at early learners. India has a large and growing market for early learning but fancy kindergarten services and mobile apps are out of bounds for millions of children in tribal areas and remote villages. Children grow up in diverse environments and their early learning has to be rooted socially and culturally in their environment. Early childhood care and education are critical not only for the proper growth of children but also for mothers working in fields and engaged in other vocations. The concept of an Anganwadi emerged from this thinking almost a century ago, and it got popularized in rural areas through an innovative government programme, the Integrated Child Development Services scheme (ICDS), launched in 1975. The idea of pre-schooling through kindergarten is focused on education, while a nursery is meant for childcare. What made ICDS unique is that it combines child education and care, along with other components for both children and mothers. It offers a package of integrated services – nutrition, health, education, day care for children under six years of age, along with nutrition and health for expectant and nursing mothers. Each centre, handled by an Anganwadi worker and an assistant, provides supplementary nutrition, preschool non-formal education, nutrition and health education, immunization services, health check-ups and referral services. It was

a conscious move to enlist volunteers and representatives of the community as Anganwadi workers because regular salaried government servants are often seen as part of the establishment and the bureaucracy. The need for a scheme specifically for preschool children was felt due to very high rates of infant mortality, morbidity, malnutrition and maternal mortality during birth seen in the decades after Independence. Research in the 1960s showed that the prevalence of severe forms of malnutrition among preschool children was mainly due to energy deficiency and not due to protein deficiency, as was assumed till then. Based on this, experts recommended a supplementary feeding programme to provide 300 Kcal/day to improve the nutritional status of children in rural areas and urban slums. This formed the basis for the programme, which was launched with 5,000 Anganwadis in 1975. The total number of Anganwadi and mini-Anganwadi centres in 2015 was close to 14 lakh, making it the world’s largest integrated early childhood care and education programme. It serves as a bridge between children and mothers with primary health and elementary education systems. For a government scheme to be given an informal name like ‘Anganwadi’ is interesting and has its origins in Bordi and Kosbad villages in the Palghar district of Maharashtra. It was in Bordi that Tarabai Modak, a Gandhian preschool education pioneer, started a pre-primary education centre, Gram Bal Shikshan Kendra, and also a Balwadi or orchard (wadi) of children. When some children did not come to the Balwadi, teachers and children from the Balwadi would go to houses of absentee children and carry out Balwadi activities from the angan or courtyard of their homes. A new word and a more informal name was thus coined – Anganwadi. The pioneering work of Modak was an inspiration behind ICSDS, hence the centres under the scheme got this name. The Gram Bal Shikshan Kendra and the Nutan Bal Shikshan Sangh (NBSS) still run Balwadis in Kosbad. Over the years, several studies and evaluations have shown beneficial effects of ICDS on the nutrition and health status of preschool children, though malnutrition and stunting have not completely disappeared. It has been found that children in areas not covered by an Anganwadi are significantly more undernourished than those in areas covered by one. However, the scheme faced problems like inadequate coverage, poor salaries for Anganwadi workers, gaps in implementation and the perception that it is only a ‘feeding’ programme. Key Players Tarabai Modak, considered a pioneer in preschool education, was a graduate from the University of Bombay and then became the first Indian to become principal of the Barton Female Training College (now known as the District Institute of Education and Training) in Rajkot. It was here that she got exposed to the work of Maria Montessori, inspiring her to train her daughter by using the methods of Montessori. Then she co-founded a preschool and later moved to Bombay. Influenced by Gandhi’s approach to basic education, she moved to Palghar where she founded NBSS and the Balwadis for tribal and rural communities. Her partner in this effort was another motivated lady, Anutai Wagh. Together, they adapted Montessori’s child pedagogy to the context of rural India. They would attract children with songs, processions and outdoor activities. When they would find that children were hungry, they would feed them. The two made all teaching aids and play equipment using local material in villages, with the help of local artisans. Wagh, in her book How to Run a Balwadi, has described the methodology in detail with examples of learning activities. The book, originally written in Marathi, was published in English by UNICEF in 1979.

While the conceptual framework of ICDS was inspired by the work of Modak and Wagh, scientific evidence about nutrition inputs for the scheme came from Dr C. Gopalan, who was the director of the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) at Hyderabad and later, director-general of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). In 1970, the Central Advisory Board of Education formed a Study Group on the Development of the Preschool Child headed by Mina Swaminathan, who had initiated a programme of mobile creches for women in the construction sector in Delhi. The committee submitted its report to the government in 1972, and its recommendations formed the basis for formulating the scheme. Swaminathan’s work showed low-cost early childhood education was possible in the informal sector. 14. Right to Food The self-sufficiency in food production achieved through the Green Revolution in the 1970s and ’80s was a major achievement and led to the availability of food across the country. The Food Corporation of India (FCI), which procured foodgrains from farmers and also developed buffer stocks, along with the PDS in states helped in this process. But this did not bring about the eradication of hunger and malnutrition fully. In 2019, India was in the 102nd position in a listing of 117 countries that were ranked at the Global Hunger Index. This does not negate the progress made so far in ensuring food security but points to gaps in access and coverage as well as new challenges. The Right to Food campaign, spearheaded by civil society organizations, along with judicial intervention, led to the National Food Security Act, 2013. The law mandates all governments to provide three types of entitlements: subsidized foodgrains under the PDS; nutritious food for children as well as pregnant and lactating women; and maternity entitlements for pregnant women. The PDS entitlement includes 35 kilograms of food grains per month at `3 per kg for rice, `2 per kg for wheat, `1 per kg for millets for ‘antyodaya’ or economically weaker households; and 5 kilograms of foodgrains per person at the same rate for ‘priority’ households. In the same way, free supplementary nutrition in the form of cooked meals has to be provided for children below the age of six years at every Anganwadi. Similar provisions have been made for pregnant and lactating mothers. While it had been recognized for long that the right to food was a part of the right to life (interpreted as a right to live with dignity) under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, the issue came into sharp focus at the turn of the century, in the context of the third consecutive drought in Rajasthan in 2001 resulting in deaths due to hunger. These starvation deaths occurred at a time when FCI warehouses had 40 million tonnes of foodgrains in stock. In a petition filed before the Supreme Court of India, the state unit of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties argued that it was the government’s responsibility to alleviate hunger in times of distress. The petition pointed out that the assistance provided to households living below the poverty line through the PDS amounted to less than `5 per person per month. The court accepted the petition and extended its ambit to cover all the states. In November 2001, the apex court directed the government to fully implement eight schemes related to food and nutrition. The court said, ‘We direct all the state governments to forthwith lift the entire allotment of food grains from the central government under the various schemes and disburse the same following the schemes.’ The list of schemes covered in this order included the Annapurna, Antyodaya Anna Yojana, Integrated Child Development, Midday Meal, National Family Benefit, National Maternity Benefit and National Old-age Pension schemes as well as Targeted PDS. The court also fixed a deadline, and subsequently appointed two commissioners, Dr N.C. Saxena and S.R.

Sankaran, to monitor the implementation of its directions and advise the court on further directions through periodic reports. Later, social activist Harsh Mander replaced Sankaran. The court directives and action became a landmark and in effect, the court’s order turned government schemes into legal entitlements, making it obligatory for the governments to implement them. After nearly a decade of twists and turns – including a tug-of-war between the central government and the National Advisory Council chaired by Sonia Gandhi, opposition from the Planning Commission and long proceedings in parliamentary panels – the National Food Security Act (NFSA) was passed in 2013 to codify into law what the Supreme Court had ordered. As a result of the nationwide implementation of the law, the total number of beneficiaries under NFSA in December 2019 was 80 crore. The Right to Food litigation and the resulting law is a watershed moment, for the sheer depth and spread of issues they addressed, such as hunger, maternity benefits, childcare, nutrition, school meals, social security and so on, besides systemic problems in the governance of the PDS, grievance redressals and cash transfers for benefits. The public interest litigation stands out as a great example of the rights-based approach in general and had an impact on the framing of socioeconomic policies in the country based on principles enshrined in the Indian Constitution. The Right to Food campaign as well as the implementation of the NFSA continued to pose new challenges in the 2010s, with the central government bringing in new provisions, such as using Aadhaar authentication for midday meals and disbursal of foodgrains under the PDS. Key Players The idea of filing a public interest writ in the Supreme Court was a brainchild of human rights lawyer Colin Gonsalves, People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) activist Kavita Srivastava and economist Jean Dreze. During a casual meeting in Jaipur in early 2001, when the three were discussing the hunger deaths occurring in Rajasthan, Jean Dreze mentioned that it was a case of hunger amidst plenty. Millions of tonnes of foodgrains were lying in the godowns and yet people were dying of hunger. If one were to take out these grains in a straight line, he said, they would go to the moon and back. Why does the government not distribute grains to the poor? Gonsalves suggested filing a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court. Kavita and Jean provided the necessary data from Rajasthan and a petition was filed seeking implementation of the British-era Famine Codes in the state. Gonsalves wanted to give it a shot, despite fully knowing that a similar petition filed in 1996 for starvation deaths in Kalahandi in Orissa was not entertained by the court. The court, this time, not only admitted the petition but also expanded its scope to all the states and issued forty orders during the litigation providing rights and entitlements to millions of people. The role played by court-appointed commissioners – N.C. Saxena and S.R. Sankaran, both former bureaucrats – was also crucial in monitoring the implementation of the orders. After Sankaran’s term, Harsh Mander, former IAS officer and social activist, was appointed to assist Saxena. Saxena, Mander and Dreze, among others, were also involved in drafting the NFSA as members of the National Advisory Council (NAC). 15. Sulabh Toilets Sanitation is a basic condition for human development. Lack of access to proper sanitation is one of the major causes of ill health and disease, particularly among children. The provision of adequate sanitation facilities

depends on the availability and adequate supply of water along with waste disposal systems and sewerage networks. The lack of such enabling facilities gives rise to the practice of open defecation in rural areas and parts of big cities. Even decades after Independence, poor sanitation remained a challenge in India. According to the census data only 10 per cent of the rural population in India had access to sanitary facilities in 1991. The inhuman practice of manual scavenging was prevalent in many parts of the country where dry and bucket toilets were in use. Scavenging kept alive the social malaise of untouchability. The government schemes for rural sanitation had little success since they promoted single-pit toilets which would overflow in a short time, and become dysfunctional. The investments in rural water supply and sewerage were also poor. It was no different in the cities where the condition of public lavatories was pathetic. Such a dismal sanitation scenario in India changed dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s with the advent and dissemination of a new toilet technology – the twin-pit toilet. It helped address technological, environmental and social problems responsible for low sanitation coverage in a holistic manner, not just in India but in several countries in Asia and Africa. The twin-pit, pour-flush, compost toilet system – developed by a non-profit organization, Sulabh International, in 1973 – proved highly suitable for rural areas as it required one-fifth of water compared to water closet (WC) toilets and needed no sewerage connection. It consists of a squatting pan, a specially designed trap with a water seal that needs 1 to 1.5 litre of water for every use. The toilet is connected to two cylindrical pits of varying size and capacity depending on the number of users. When one pit gets full in about three years, incoming excreta is diverted into the second pit. In about two years, the sludge gets digested, becomes dry and free of pathogens, and can thus be used as manure and for soil conditioning. The pits can be constructed using locally available materials following designs suitable for different topographies and terrain. The technology was first introduced in Patna in 1974, and gradually spread to other districts. In 1978, the benefits of the two-pit system were presented at a national seminar attended by officials from the central government, WHO and UNICEF. The meeting recommended that twin-pit toilets and the model of public toilets demonstrated in Bihar should be adopted by other Indian states. Soon, the World Bank and other international agencies approved it for dissemination in developing countries across the world. Since 1974, Sulabh has constructed over 1.5 million twin-pit toilets all over the country. The twin-pit toilet was the core technology in the Swachh Bharat Mission launched by the central government in 2014 to end the practice of open defecation. The social fallout of the Sulabh model has been immense. The twin-pit toilet was mainly developed as a replacement for bucket toilets which had to be cleaned manually by scavengers. Thousands of people belonging to the so-called lower castes had to clean toilets and carry night soil on their heads. The new technology helped to end this practice of manual scavenging to a great extent. Sulabh claims to have liberated over 200,000 people from handling human excreta and in facilitating their economic and rehabilitation through vocational training. Another innovation pioneered by Sulabh is the pay-and-use toilet concept to serve people in urban slums and making sanitation service self-sustainable. Given the pathetic condition of public lavatories in cities, municipal bodies across the country adopted the Sulabh model. The toilet complexes in public places such as bus and railway stations, hospitals and religious centres also provide services like bathing and washing round the clock. Sulabh has also demonstrated recycling human excreta to generate biogas, and has introduced novel solid waste management techniques. Key People

The two-pit technology is the brainchild of Bindeshwar Pathak, who as a young man in the 1960s experienced problems resulting from the lack of toilets in his village and had seen untouchability being practised by the elderly people in his family. While working as a volunteer in the Bihar Gandhi Centenary Committee in Patna, he came across a booklet on rural sanitation published by WHO. It mentioned several criteria for a sanitary toilet such as avoiding contamination of surface soil, groundwater, surface water – and no handling of excreta. It also mentioned that the method used should be simple and inexpensive in construction and operation. The booklet triggered a chain of events until Pathak modified the single-pit toilet and came up with the two-pit idea that fulfilled all the criteria listed by WHO. He was inspired by Gandhian principles of cleanliness and welfare of Harijans so he went to a village in Champaran and lived in a colony of scavengers to work with them. After this, Pathak founded the Sulabh Shauchalaya Sansthan (which later became Sulabh International) in 1970 to work on sanitation in Bihar. Despite ridicule from society (he is an upper-caste Brahmin by birth) and lack of funding or support from the government, he continued to pursue his idea of the new toilet technology. The first breakthrough came in 1974 with the state government of Bihar accepting his idea of a ‘pay and use’ toilet in Patna and his innovation went on to getting accepted all over India. References Aurora, G.S., and Ward Morehouse. ‘The dilemma of technological choice in India: The case of the small tractor’. Minerva, 12 (4), 1974: 433–58. Black, Maggie, and Rupert Talbot. Water, a Matter of Life and Health: Water Supply and Sanitation in Village India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Central Food and Technological Research Institute. Sixty Years of Research and Development at CFTRI. Mysore, 2010. Chary, V. Srinivas, A. Narender, and K. Rajeswara Rao. ‘Serving the Poor with Sanitation: The Sulabh Approach’. In Third World Water Forum, vol. 19, 2003. Chaudhuri, Shekhar. ‘Technological innovation in a research laboratory in India: A case study’. Research Policy, 15 (2), 1986: 89–103. Dasgupta, Uma Mahadevan. ‘How India’s anganwadi system is getting some things very right despite its many flaws’. The Hindu, 9 March 2019. Deshingkar, Priya, Craig Johnson, and John Farrington. ‘State transfers to the poor and back: The case of the food-for-work program in India’. World Development, 33 (4), 2005: 575–91.

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