Managing the Green Revolution: Management Knowledge and Indian Agriculture: 1963-1975

This article delves into the circulation of a set of management ideas and concepts between India and the US and the overlooked role that this body of knowledge played in India’s Green Revolution in the late 1960s. The paper takes a situated approach and examines how the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) formed a site for experimenting with management knowledge and became increasingly enmeshed with questions of rural governance by setting up a new research unit for agricultural development in the period 1963–1973. Drawing from the notion of techno-politics, the article argues that the managerial knowledge produced at this site played a significant part in the developmental politics of the Indian state that constituted India’s Green Revolution. The paper describes how the management concepts introduced under the rubric of “agribusiness” – developed in the context of an industrial society and American post-war capitalism – were unpacked and aligned to the dominant developmental imaginaries of the political elite and used in the agenda to rebuild India’s rural areas on the principles of cooperative organization and modes of production.