 "Dhirajlal Desai")
Dhirajlal Desai (91), who passed away in Ahmedabad on February 16, was the doyen of Indian agricultural economists. Our agriculture and those drawing their livelihood from it might still be in some distress today. That despair would have been considerably greater but for the contribution of pioneering thinkers such as Desai, who worked tirelessly with scientists and policy makers to usher in and sustain the Green Revolution.
Policy making in the 1960s, or what passed for it, was the exclusive domain of New Delhi, mainly of Krishi and Yojana Bhavans. What they had by way of field intelligence were the mostly routine cost of cultivation studies by agro-economic research centres.
Desai, then a professor at the fledgling Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), offered to the ministry to take up under the aegis of the Centre for Management of Agriculture (CMA) five policy-oriented field-based research studies annually. That might not sound like a great effort in a country with as much agro-economic diversity as India, but it must be seen against the backdrop of no such work at all.
The focus of these studies was implementation (now execution or governance). It addressed the basic nuts and bolts concerns of the policy makers. That justified their award to a management institution. The coverage was diverse and novel: The new intensive programmes of the government, inputs such as seeds, fertiliser, water and mechanisation, impact on labour, employment and poverty, nutrition, community development, and processing of outputs in modern facilities. Desai broke many an inflated ego to ensure that workable and readable reports were delivered in time.
The breadth and the quickness of research made it attractive many funding agencies, including World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the United States Agency of International Development and the Ford Foundation. CMA became IIM-A's face in the research and public policy areas. It helped create the impression that IIM-A was interested not just in profit-making private enterprises but was greatly concerned about public policies to combat poverty. CMA's association with the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration for offering a management capsule in the training of the Indian Administrative Service probationers gave wide receptivity for IIM-A in the administrative structure.
This fast and phenomenal success of CMA preceded its later claim to fame as a premier management institute based on the stellar performance of its graduates. It must be credited to the boundless enterprise and energy of its first chairman, D K Desai. IIM-A stands tall today because it is perched on the shoulders of such pioneers.
