The Men in the Khaki

Khaki is the Indian farmer's word for the dusty, brown, bare countryside of northern India--a word that imperial British soldiers long ago adopted to describe the sand-drab color of their field uniforms. Last week, from the tea gardens of the Malabar Coast to the millet patches of the high Himalaya, Indians were discussing the government's new third five-year plan (1961-66), in which highest priority is assigned to agriculture.

The goal is a 33% increase in food production in five years--enough to enable India to feed itself. Western experts think it can be done, but the problem narrows down to the special and often exasperating problems of "the man behind the plow," the Indian khaki farmer.

One such farmer is wiry, half-naked Jagjit, sixtyish, whose 20 acres of Punjab sugar cane, wheat and pulses brought him a cash income of $485 last year. For weeks Jagjit worked night and day carrying buckets to save his half-acre patch of cane from the searing Indian sun; last week the violent onset of monsoon rains threatened to wash away his fields. Jagjit cannot afford to buy chemical fertilizer. He uses cow dung to manure his fields, but only during the monsoon, when the dung cannot be dried; the rest of the time he collects it in great mounds and uses it for fuel. "We know this is wasteful," he said, "but there is nothing else to burn." Joining his palms and gazing reverently upward, he murmured:

"If Paramatman [God] is not willing, then I must accept my fate."

Blood & Banians. Fate, for most khaki farmers, is another visit to the banian, or village moneylender. Of Jagjit's 30-bushel wheat crop, the banian already gets about a third. The banian's charge for a bushel of wheat: two bushels at harvest time, the equivalent of 100% interest. Yet Jagjit and others would rather take their chances with a local banian's mercy than ask for government credit. "The government drinks the blood of the farmers," said Jagjit fiercely. "It charges 12% interest, and wants the money back as soon as the term of the loan is up. The banian can be shamed if you clasp your hands and plead, but not the government. If I default, it will sell my goods to pay my loan."

As khaki farmers go, Jagjit must be accounted progressive. In all the 600,000 villages of India, only i% of the farmers till their land with anything more up to date than a metal-tipped stick. There are only 34,000 tractors in the whole country. But even if tractors were available in any quantity, most farmers' plots are too tiny to justify their use. The government has persuaded only a few to band together in cooperatives. For an Indian feels deeply attached to his own land and hates the idea of working on someone else's; nor does he like to trust anyone else to do his buying and selling for him. Punjabi Farmer Parbhu Dayal, 62, observed last week: "If the cooperative's tractor goes out of order, those who run the cooperative send it off to Delhi for repairs, and if the repairs cost 30 or 40 rupees, they mark it as 200 rupees in the accounts and pocket the difference."

Cows & Calories. After ten years' incessant government educational work, religious and social resistance to rural advance has been reduced. Though Parbhu Dayal, for example, is a good Brahman who would never knowingly take the life of any animal, he welcomes government agents who arrive to poison rats and to spray insecticides in his fields. Another Punjabi farmer, Kartar Singh, 26, grudgingly admitted that his brother from New Delhi had added 20% to last year's wheat harvest by spreading rat poison around the farm during one of his visits.

But India is still the land where 200 million sacred cows roam the fields and towns unmolested while families go without meat for weeks at a time. New Delhi's planners now forecast the 1966 population at 480 million--an increase of 65 million over the present total, or the equivalent of the population of Brazil. To help India feed this huge population during the next five years, the U.S. has agreed to lend $1.3 billion to pay for 17 million tons of U.S. surplus wheat and rice (TIME, May 16). But ultimately, India's economic stability will depend on learning to feed itself. And that will be up to the khaki farmers.

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