Explained: What Was The Grow More Food Campaign

The 1952 Republic Day celebrations included an element that would celebrate the farmers and their contribution to the country. ¡®Nehru suggested that a part of the parade display could depict ¡®the Grow-More-Food campaign¡¯ with a tableau representing the abundance of food and that farmers winning state competitions for agricultural production should be invited to Delhi at the government¡¯s expense to participate in the parade.¡¯ writes Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan in ¡®Imagining the Indian Nation: The Design of Gandhi¡¯s Dandi March and Nehru¡¯s Republic Day Parade.¡¯

The background of the campaign

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India's food industry was severely strained when the Second World War broke out; the war shut off India from the global food markets on which it had come to rely. Hoarding resulted from shortages and invasion fears and transportation networks could not deliver food to due to the movement of war materials.

The Bengal Famine

The real catastrophe started in March 1942, when Burma fell to the Japanese. Since Burma and India split in 1937, India had been importing a few million tonnes of rice from its eastern neighbour every year. When the Japanese took over Burma, this resource was immediately lost. In Bengal, rice crops were destroyed by a cyclone and disease in the same year. The country faced a double whammy: natural and artificial.

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Although the British government made an effort to control prices and transfer food from the surplus to deficit areas, several provinces forbade the export of food, which made it impossible to stop grain hoarding or dispersal.

The mismanagement by the British government created one of the greatest man-made disasters of the 20th century: the Bengal Famine of 1943. And millions perished in the disaster.

The first attempt

The Grow More Food Program was introduced in the same year. It made an effort to promote more extensive and intense farming. According to one story, the initial Grow More Food programme was,¡¯ improvised in a hurry and under the pressure of compelling events it had naturally to be built upon such knowledge as was readily available and with such resources in trained personnel and material as could be hastily mustered.¡¯

By the end of the war, the administration was unable to even provide an estimate of the increase in production brought about by the Grow More Food campaign, despite more than two years of ¡®extending cultivation, emergency irrigation works, manure schemes, seed distribution, and other programmes.¡¯

The campaign after independence

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The Government of India decided to stop the imports of additional food grains after 1951 in order to save its precious foreign reserves from depletion. The government also committed to stepping up efforts to increase domestic food production.

In an address to the nation, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru said,¡¯ If we do not produce enough food for our country, we become dependent upon other countries, and in a matter like food we cannot afford to be dependent.¡¯

The second Campaign

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The Grow More Food Campaign was re-launched with the goal of self-sufficiency. However, the plan consisted of not one but two campaigns. ¡®one deployed the tools of a self-styled scientific development planning and functioned through the bureaucracy; the other was conducted on the popular level and placed its faith in the collective power of the people to mould their destiny outside of the state.¡¯

The Campaign was designed according to the ways the Congress party knew best. ¡®t was a nation-wide popular movement in which the people were to be marched into the battle for national self-sufficiency.¡¯

Pandit Nehru said,¡¯¡® It is a war in which every citizen can be a soldier and can serve his or her country.¡¯