Pratyusha Basu

Success and failure of crossbred cows in India: a place-based approach to rural development.

Although Indias cooperative dairying program is lauded as a model of successful rural development, lack of uniformity in replication of the program across rural India has raised questions about the meanings of success. Differences between dairy cooperatives become especially apparent when crossbred cows are considered, so that the promotion of crossbreds by dairy development agencies has not always resulted in their actual adoption by farmers. This article seeks to explain the mixed reception accorded to crossbred cows by focusing on the link between development and place. By discussing both official discourses and local perspectives, the article enables two kinds of understanding of dairy development. First, the rise and fall of support for crossbred cows within Indias national plans suggest that contrasts between official policies and local practices of dairying need to be attentive to the dynamics of both discourses and places. Second, the comparison between two villages—one utilizing crossbred cows and the other water buffaloes as principal dairy animals—shows that evaluations of success or failure cannot be made simply on the basis of adoption or rejection of crossbred cows but requires engagement with place-specific agricultural economies and social relations. Given the liberalization of Indias dairy sector, official discourses and material experiences of cooperative dairying become significant for ascertaining future possibilities for small-scale farming and equitable economic growth in rural India.

Land, Labor, and Rural Development: Analyzing Participation in India's Village Dairy Cooperatives

Livestock-based livelihoods are currently being promoted by international development agencies as part of global efforts to combat poverty. Indias dairy development program, organized around village cooperatives, has become an important model for such efforts. This article aims to identify household characteristics that influence membership in Indias rural dairy cooperatives by comparing two villages representing different degrees of success. Utilizing logistic regression methods, data collected through a comprehensive survey of all households in the two villages are analyzed to examine (1) how variables describing animal ownership, agricultural attributes, and household labor availability contribute to explaining membership in the dairy cooperative; and (2) whether factors influencing membership differ across the two villages. Our results indicate that although agricultural property ownership influences cooperative membership in both villages, the kind of dairy animal used and labor utilized for dairying work also have a significant and context-specific effect on household participation.

Technological and social dimensions of the Green Revolution: connecting pasts and futures

The ‘Green Revolution’, which has been marked by substantial and rapid increases in agricultural productivity from the 1950s onwards owing to high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, large-scale irrigation and mechanization, as well as funding provided by international development aid agencies, is now embroiled in debates over possible pathways towards sustainable agricultural futures. Among the principal reasons for renewed debates is the decline in productivity gains since the 1990s as existing Green Revolution technologies reach their limits. Debates are also more broadly linked to the current financial crisis that has spurred the search for new spaces of accumulation and raised the value of rural resources (Harvey 2003, Moore 2008), and to food shortages that emerged due to the volatility of food prices, partly linked to the utilization of farmland for biofuels (McMichael 2010, Moseley et al. 2010). This special issue provides a critical analysis of the technology–society nexus (borrowing from the science–society nexus in Jackson 2005) that characterized the Green Revolution across the Global South. This nexus is approached in terms of its construction, adoption and sustainability, which can also be considered to be the three stages in the evolution of the Green Revolution. The construction of the technology–society nexus is often based on unidirectional flows of knowledge from experts to farmers, and the institutional framework for the origin and spread of the Green Revolution consisted of an internationally coordinated alliance of scientists, governments, corporations and development agencies. Concerns over the control of knowledge have thus accompanied the Green Revolution, becoming more intense due to legally defined ownership of intellectual property in genetically modified organisms, forms of plant and animal species that are part of the new Gene Revolution (Buttel et al. 1985). A focus on the adoption of Green Revolution technologies draws attention to the ways in which this was shaped by social inequalities. The continuing importance of land ownership, gender and indigenous identity, among other economic and social differences, in the ability to adopt and benefit from Green Revolution technologies, demonstrates that new technologies do not by themselves overturn entrenched economic and social orders (e.g. Chambers 2010). But the technology–society nexus is also transformative in terms of existing identities, so that new technologies are linked to new forms of political organization, ranging from agribusiness lobbies to peasant movements (e.g. Brass 1995), which in turn play a role in how Green Revolution technologies become unevenly distributed across national and international spaces.

Environmental justice implications of industrial hazardous waste generation in India: a national scale analysis

While rising air and water pollution have become issues of widespread public concern in India, the relationship between spatial distribution of environmental pollution and social disadvantage has received less attention. This lack of attention becomes particularly relevant in the context of industrial pollution, as India continues to pursue industrial development policies without sufficient regard to its adverse social impacts. This letter examines industrial pollution in India from an environmental justice (EJ) perspective by presenting a national scale study of social inequities in the distribution of industrial hazardous waste generation. Our analysis connects district-level data from the 2009 National Inventory of Hazardous Waste Generating Industries with variables representing urbanization, social disadvantage, and socioeconomic status from the 2011 Census of India. Our results indicate that more urbanized and densely populated districts with a higher proportion of socially and economically disadvantaged residents are significantly more likely to generate hazardous waste. The quantity of hazardous waste generated is significantly higher in more urbanized but sparsely populated districts with a higher proportion of economically disadvantaged households, after accounting for other relevant explanatory factors such as literacy and social disadvantage. These findings underscore the growing need to incorporate EJ considerations in future industrial development and waste management in India.

The Other Side of Sprawl: A County-Level Analysis of Farm Loss in Florida

Even as ex-urban population growth has shifted attention to possible economic revitalization, rural communities in the U.S. continue to exhibit long-standing trends of agricultural decline. This article focuses on the nature and extent of farm losses in the rapidly urbanizing state of Florida. It aims to provide a rural perspective on contemporary concerns with urban sprawl, and contrast national-level studies of farm decline with regional understandings. Recent county-level changes in farm proprietorship are measured in terms of the difference in number of farms between 1997 and 2002. This change is related through regression models to four categories of explanatory factors: degree of urbanization, farm operator demographics, economic characteristics, and agrarian land use characteristics. A detailed understanding of agricultural decline is obtained by contrasting variables that significantly affect likelihood of farm loss across all counties with those that influence magnitude of farm loss among counties experiencing decline.

Crop–livestock systems in rural development: linking India's Green and White Revolutions

In discussions on agricultural transformations produced by Green Revolution technologies, an exclusive focus on crops has led to incomplete understanding of the value of livestock in rural economies. The incorporation of crop–livestock systems seems even more pertinent in the context of India, given that the Green Revolution here was also accompanied by a White Revolution in dairying. This paper explicates the links between Indias Green and White Revolutions by juxtaposing international and national policies of rural development with village-level practices of cropping and dairying. It begins by comparing the Green and White Revolutions in India, both the dissimilarities that marked their origins and how the White Revolution subsequently grappled with a notion of productivity mirroring that of the Green Revolution. Two village-level case studies then illustrate how dependence on both crops and cattle shape rural livelihoods in ways that require an interrelated understanding of Green–White Revolutions. Overall, this paper shows how the socio-economic and environmental value of crop–livestock farming is valuable for understanding the complexities of small-scale livelihoods, and suggests lessons for building sustainable programmes of rural development.

Connecting high school and university teachers in national and international contexts: perspectives from the 2012 Bangalore workshop of the AAG-CGGE

This paper focuses on the Center for Global Geography Education teaching workshop held in Bangalore, India, in March 2012 which served as a collaborative forum linking geography teachers in secondary and higher education in the USA and India. It considers the inclusion of the Advanced Placement Human Geography teachers from the USA and the building of global teaching content in collaborative teams as a useful way to connect geography teachers across institutional contexts. Based on a survey of workshop participants, it also highlights some of the issues that need to be addressed for further strengthening of high school–university linkages within national and across international contexts.

Geographies and histories of the Green Revolution: from global flows to place-based experiences

From the 1960s, agriculture across the developing world was transformed through new technologies and policies collectively designated as the ‘Green Revolution’. While major increases in food production can be traced to Green Revolution technologies, their environmental and social outcomes have remained matters of concern, including pollution and species and habitat loss, and persistent food and livelihoods insecurities. The Green Revolution also denoted a new ideology of agriculture that shifted agricultural innovations from farmers’ fields to scientific laboratories, and often argued for the universal dispersal of such innovations. The globalization of science and development was thus a central component of the Green Revolution and this chapter seeks to understand the Green Revolution through the lens of these global flows. Overall, this chapter considers how the unfolding of the Green Revolution has been accompanied by North–South technology flows, beginning in South America and Asia, and currently extending to new sites in Africa.

Engineering Cattle for Dairy Development in Rural India

The upgrading of cattle and buffalo breeds for higher milk productivity is a key aim of India’s dairy development program, and has been undertaken in part through the crossbreeding of indigenous cattle with high-yielding European dairy breeds. In the process, threats posed to the survival of both indigenous cattle and practices of mixed faming have become a matter of concern. This chapter follows the megaengineering of rural livelihoods in India through new technologies of cattle breeding, and argues that the outcomes of such engineering practices are shaped by the social and environmental contexts within which they have to be implemented. To begin with, the promotion of animals geared exclusively towards dairying fits uncomfortably with agrarian systems that assign multiple values to cattle and buffaloes. Alongside, the higher productivity of crossbreds requires the availability of labor for dairying tasks, as well as the presence of refrigeration facilities and transport links for the efficient dispersal of large quantities of milk. Gender divisions of work as well as historical inequalities in infrastructural growth in rural India thus structure the ability of new technologies of dairying to fit into the context-specific mix of rural livelihoods. More broadly, this study of the technological transformation of animals provides further insights into the ways in which the megaengineering of nature is not just a matter of scientific expertise, but is also crucially dependent on the everyday labor of rural people.