Abstract

During the early period of our indepen- dence the country was facing a serious food crisis. At that time the famous four-point aid programme of President Truman was proclaimed, whereby the U. S. Government came forward to offer assistance to any under-developed country to better the standard of living of its people. The Government of India took advantage of this offer and requested that experts may be sent to this country to suggest ways and means to avert the recurring food crisis. Accordingly, a team of food production experts visited the country and made certain recommendations of which the most important was the large scale use of chemical fertilizers in crop production. It may be recalled that those were the years when only very meagre quantities of fertilizers were being used by our farmers. In fact, excepting for fertilizers used by the plantation industry, very little fertilizer was used generally by farmers. Hence the need arose for wide scale demonstrations on the use of the chemical fertilizers. For this purpose the United States Government offered free supply of 50,000 tons of chemical fertilizers and the scheme for demonstrations on the use of fertilizers on cereal crops on a country-wide scale was launched in 1954.

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