380 Modern Agricultural Reforms
with all contours marked, the locations for woodlots, paddocks and homestead,
and where to plant cash and food crops.
All of this required the monitoring of farming practices to ensure compliance.
The final stage of control was achieved by the compulsory resettlement of farmers
to centralized linear settlements where they could be observed more easily. In
Kenya, more than one million people were moved in the mid-1950s to some 850
new linear villages (Huxley, 1960). Officials, proud of the new neatness and order,
commented that farms of one village in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), were ‘all in
lines and look very nice’ (Alvord, in Beinart, 1984).
This was a complete contrast to the traditional way villages in East and South-
ern Africa are arranged. Now many of the straight paths and tracks readily became
gullies, as they concentrated water flow down slopes. The contrast again with tra-
ditional practices, where paths were laid out in zig-zag patterns, is significant (Wil-
son, 1989). Soil and water conservation had extended to the remoulding of all
aspects of rural life.
Soil and water conservation in South Asia
As in the US and colonial Africa, there is a long history of both recognizing and
ignoring local conservation practices in South Asia. The earliest accounts show
that in 1888 some 1200ha of ravines in Uttar Pradesh were treated with conserva-
tion measures to protect the adjoining town of Etawah from water erosion. This
was followed by tree planting, and fanners were coerced into adopting zero-grazing
for livestock. The programme was acclaimed a success (PRAI, 1963).
At the same time, though, visitors were seeing local innovation and skills. Pro-
fessor Voelcker, a consultant to the Royal Agricultural Society of England, visited
India in 1889 and wrote in his report: ‘Nowhere would one find better instances
of keeping land scrupulously clean from weeds, of ingenuity in device of water rais-
ing appliances, of knowledge of soils and their capabilities as well as the exact time to
sow and reap, as one would in Indian agriculture. It is wonderful, too, how much is
known of rotation, the system of mixed crops and of fallowing. Certain it is that I, at
least, have never seen a more perfect picture of careful cultivation, combined with
hard labour, perseverance and fertility of resources’ (in Dogra, 1983).
By 1928, the Royal Commission on Agriculture had recognized soil erosion as
a problem of special importance, and had noted work already in progress: ‘In the
United Provinces, the main remedy for soil erosion has been sought in the affores-
tation of the ravine tracts. In Bombay [now Maharashtra State], the measures
adopted to prevent soil erosion are terracing of land and the construction of earth
and stone embankments.’ The Famine Enquiry Commission of 1945 later indi-
cated that the large-scale experiments conducted in Bombay had produced results
sufficiently satisfactory to warrant contour bunding on a large scale. In Bombay,
conservation work started in 1939 when the scheme for bunding and dry farming
development was sanctioned. A similar act was passed in Madras in 1949 for con-
tour trenching and bunding.