Fall Research Expo 2020

Crisis Talk: The Ford Foundation in India, 1952-61

This project is a response to two related questions: where do crises come from and what does crisis talk do? I track the activities of the Ford Foundation in India between early 1950s-60s, paying close attention to its 1959 Report on Food Crisis in India and Steps to Meet It. The report stemmed from the Foundation’s frustration with India’s development strategy which underwent a Soviet-style turn towards rapid industrialization in 1955. Its authors use what one observer calls a “strategy of terror” to argue that unless India immediately shifted its focus to a food-first (and industry-second) approach to development, it would face a grave food crisis that no amount of imports could ameliorate. However, I argue that this crisis talk was not so much as predicting a future, as creating it – one where India’s development goals were more closely aligned with the West’s in the context of the Cold War. Crisis, thus, served as a powerful tool for the Foundation to make a case for a highly unpopular policy recommendation that was otherwise bound to be rejected.

This work was completed as a part of my senior thesis in Science, Technology and Society, and is funded by the Center for the Advanced Study of India, Wolf Humanities Center, and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. 

PRESENTED BY
Gelfman International Summer Fund
College of Arts & Sciences 2021
Advised By
Etienne Benson
Associate Professor, Department of History and Sociology of Science
Join Tathagat for a virtual discussion
PRESENTED BY
Gelfman International Summer Fund
College of Arts & Sciences 2021
Advised By
Etienne Benson
Associate Professor, Department of History and Sociology of Science

Comments

This is a really exciting project. I'm curious - why do you think the US would be interested in a food-first (instead of industry-first) model for India? Does this support the US's own growth strategies (or dominance strategies) in that time period?

That's a really good question. A big reason behind this peculiar American preference for food-first development strategies is the Cold War. A lot of US bureaucrats and technical experts at the time are worried about "losing" the Third World to the Communists, and one way they imagine this loss is on ideological grounds: when countries like India shift towards Soviet-style rapid industrialization, that's a defeat for the capitalist bloc.

Another (not entirely unrelated) reason is probably that the experts of the Ford Foundation have background in agriculture (many of them used to work for the USDA) so if India focuses on industrialization, it does not need the Ford Foundation's expertise so much anymore. Timothy Mitchell's insight that development experts often define problems in such a way that automatically makes them the "experts" is very relevant here.

I would say yes, given how much traction their report gained simply in terms of newspaper coverage. Although it would take another crisis in 1964 to actually change the track of Indian development, eventually resulting in the Green Revolution.