ABSTRACT
What struck me most when traveling in the winter of 1978-79 for six weeks through rural India was not the pervasive poverty or the palpable unemployment; I had expected both. What I had not expected, however, were the four or five brand-new bicycles standing outside everyone of the miserable hovels-and not one of them chained or locked. There may still be more bullock carts in rural India than bicycles; there surely are still infinitely more bullock carts than there are small tractors. But what powers India's Green Revolution, what has given the subcontinent a food
surplus for the first time in its thousands of years, is not the digging stick or the wooden plow. It is the ubiquitous gasoline pump in the tub well and the irrigation ditch of an arid land.
