The Green Revolution and Poverty in Northern Tamil Nadu: a Brief Synthesis of Village-Level Research in the Last Half-Century

Abstract

Between 1972 and 2014, in Northern Tamil Nadu (NTN), India, the Green Revolution (GR) in agriculture was studied through five rounds of village-level studies (VLS). Over the decades, the number of villages dwindled; from 11, rigorously and randomly selected (together with a ‘Slater’ village first studied in 1916), through to a set of three villages in a rural–urban complex around a market town, to one of the original eleven, in the fifth round. During the reorganisation of districts in 1989, the villages sited on the Coromandel plain shifted administratively from North Arcot, a vanguard GR district, to Tiruvannamalai, described then as relatively backward. A wide range of concepts, disciplines, scales, field methods and analytical approaches were deployed to address i) a common core of questions about the economic and social implications of technological change in agriculture and ii) sets of other timely questions about rural development, which changed as the project lengthened. Among the latter was poverty.