INDIA: Victory over Kans

Golden wheat can grow tall and strong in the deep (200 ft.) black topsoil in the valleys of central India, but the wheat has little chance against the predatory kans grass. For centuries, India's ryots turned their bullock-drawn, wooden plows against the kans roots, to no avail. With less & less yield from each sowing, the peasant would at last abandon his kans-infested wheatfield, blaming his ill luck on Saturn, considered an evil planet by Hindus. Between them, Saturn and kans choked some 10 million acres of hungry India's wheatlands.

A quarter of a century ago, an Indian government agronomist named Daulat R. Sethi set out to lick kans, found a way by cutting its roots a foot or so beneath the surface. At the time, India had no tools tough enough for such a job. Then came World War II and with it an army of snorting U.S. tractors to build the Burma Road. When the war was over, Sethi persuaded his government to buy 200 of the tractors, teamed up with a U.S. engineer to found the Central Tractor Organization.

The kans fighters met handicaps. Landlords and peasants alike protested the "ruining of the land." Many a native tractor driver, leaving his machine in a field overnight, returned to find a tiger sleeping in the driver's seat. Wild elephants, nature's tractors, frequently came to inspect their mechanized cousins. Bulldozers had to be drafted to build roads through the wilderness to carry fuel to the big machines. Despite India's heat and dust, the drivers—many of whom had driven tanks in the Indian army—kept their machines in top condition. When the tractors successfully cleared a 7,000-acre tract of kans, the Indian government swung a $10 million loan from the World Bank, bought 240 more U.S. tractors, equipped them with specially designed root-cutting plows. Peasants who saw others' fields freed of the weed begged to have their own plowed, and draped the tractors with blossoms.

Last year Sethi's big offensive cleared 80,000 acres of kans. By last week, with the monsoon rains expected, Sethi's tractors had rumbled to a stop for a well-earned rest. Their labors this year had freed close to 300,000 acres of wheatfields from kans, reclaimed another 30,000 acres from the jungle. The extra food they had produced in five months alone was estimated at 100,000 tons, a great victory for India, and for Western machines.