If only the rest of India was as pragmatic as the Gujaratis. « Hindu focus

• If only the rest of India was as pragmatic as the Gujaratis. « Hindu focus

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    Agriculture: Secret of Modi’s success

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    Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar, ET Bureau

  • When Narendra Modi won the 2007 state election in Gujarat, the media focused on Hindu-Muslim issues. Some journalists highlighted rapid industrial development that had made Gujarat India’s fastest-growing state. I mentioned Gujarat’s successful port-led development.
  • However, an excellent new study suggests that the secret of Modi’s success lay in agriculture, an area completely neglected by political analysts. Ashok Gulati, Tushaar Shah and Ganga Sreedhar have written an IFPRI paper, ‘Agricultural Performance in Gujarat Since 2000’, which highlights something few people know — that Gujarat’s agricultural performance is by far the best in India.
  • During the 2007 election campaign, the Congress slogan was ‘chak de, chak de Gujarat’. I heard Modi say at a rally that his reply was “check dam, check dam Gujarat.
  • He declared that Gujarat was now famous in China as the producer and exporter of Bt cotton, and he said this was a source of Gujarati pride. (Let me add that this is a great improvement on his earlier notion of Hindu pride, exemplified in his ‘gaurav yatra’ after Godhra).
  • Can this be replicated in other states? Much of it can. Jyotigram looks least likely to be replicated because it abandons the free-but-unreliable rural power that politicians regard as vote-winners in most states. Many states also prefer large irrigation projects to small water-harvesting ones, since bigger projects translate into bigger kickbacks. Yet Modi’s electoral success points to a new way of winning rural votes. Others should sit up and take notice.