Technology Gap and the Emergying Size-Productivity Relationships Following the Adoption of New Technology: An Analysis of Evidence from Northwest and Eastern India

Although the successes achieved by the adoption of new seed and fertilizer technology were impressive, especially in regions endowed with public sources of irrigation, it is often feared--on the basis of field observations and evaluation studies--that it has led to a widening of interfarm and interregional inequalities. However, the extent to which the institutional environment of a given region is responsible for such a development is not adequately appreciated in most of the evaluation studies of the Green Revolution. The basic hypothesis to be examined in this paper is: where the institutional framework (structure of landholdings, credit, and marketing institutions) is more favourable, small and large farms realize significant productivity gains from adopting new seed and fertilizer technology. In regions where such a favourable institutional environment does not prevail, large farms realized proportionately more productivity gains than small farms. A confirmation of this hypothesis would imply that the interfarm inequity in productivity gains (widely discussed in the literature on the Green Revolution) is not as important in the institutionally well-endowed regions as in the poorly endowed regions. The above hypothesis will be tested by contrasting the recent experience of two wheat growing regions--western Uttar Pradesh, which is geographically close to the northwestern plains (the scene of the Green Revolution), and the predominantly rainfed eastern Uttar Pradesh, which is located on the IndoGangetic plains in eastern India.