How India defined its food economy

CHANDIGARH: A PhD candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin and a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar to India, Jack Loveridge delivered a talk at PU Department of History. Loveridge spoke on "Time, Development, and Decolonisation: Reassessing the Origins of the Green Revolution".
He dealt directly with the nature of this influence upon independent India’s economy.He argued that a dual crisis of population growth and resource depletion, perceived and problematized by Indian and foreign scientists and officials alike, drove development theory and policy-making through the first two decades of Indian independence.
Loveridge is affiliated with the Department of History at Delhi University for the course of his fellowship. He is interested in the intertwined histories of decolonization and economic development in South Asia. For the past seven months, he has been conducting archival research at the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. He is investigating how Indian economists, physicians, and agricultural scientists worked in a global context during the 1930s and 1940s to combat the malnutrition and poverty, well ahead of the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
This research also examines how independent India sought to define the national food economy in the wake of partition and through the 1950s, initiating land reforms, community development projects, and nutritional programs to break the colonial cycle of famine.
In Chandigarh, Loveridge has been working at the Punjab and Haryana state archives, examining agricultural development projects undertaken across north India after partition. These projects, ranging from irrigation schemes to community development initiatives were encouraged and financed in part by international entities like the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Their involvement marks a dramatic and fascinating shift in Indian economic planning through the 1950s that arguably influenced the course of the later Green Revolution.