Root of the Matter

Never had the Moscow radio poured such scorn and enmity on Prime Minister Nehru's Indian government. Nehru's sin, though Moscow did not quite put it that way, was to accept U.S. help in freeing India from its periodic famines.

Last week the successful farm experiment begun by a county agent from North Carolina and Tennessee was about to be spread across the length & breadth of India. Horace Holmes, now chief of agriculture in India's Point Four program, began his experiment in the Etawah district in northern India in 1948 (TIME, Jan. 22, 1951). Says he: "I found the Indian farmer struggling with the same problems that we have in America . . . lack of good seed, lack of sufficient credit, poor land, diseases, insects, drought and pests." Holmes did not attempt to mechanize Etawah, but showed the Indian farmers how to use their primitive implements to better effect. He persuaded them to make compost of village waste, thus indirectly imposing sanitation where none had existed. He taught them how to drain their fields, how to inoculate livestock.

When he introduced legume crops to improve the soil, some religious villagers opposed the plowing-in of the live green growth. Tactfully Holmes broke down prejudices, stilled native hostility. The results were spectacular: in Etawah's 102 villages (pop. 79,000), food production jumped nearly 50% in three years. Malaria was eliminated; herds were freed from rinderpest.

Nehru decided to set up 50 Etawahs right away, each to take in an average of 300 villages, inhabited by 200,000 people. He had the money ($50 million from the U.S., $50 million from his own government) for the first six months. He needed men. At this point, the U.S.'s Ford Foundation stepped in. It promised to finance the operation of 30 to 40 training schools which would turn out 3,000 village leaders every year. This week the first five Ford Foundation training centers are scheduled to open. If all goes well, Nehru hopes to multiply the original Etawah project 600-fold by 1956, thereby benefiting one-third of India's 361 million. That would really give the Moscow radio something to talk about.

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