Growing better crops

The first time I learnt about diffusion of new ideas was when I was having a chat with my summer internship mentor, Subhas Chakravarthy, in 1978. We were discussing the challenges of launching products in the context of a new magazine that was being launched by the Ananda Bazar Group. Who will pick up a magazine that offered in-depth content, long-form interviews, and very little politics and movies? Is it possible to specifically target these consumers?

Subhas, I remember, told me about the way Indian agronomists managed to convince the largely illiterate farmers to adopt new varieties of hybrid seeds. This discussion flashed through my mind as I read the names of illustrious people who left us in the year 2023.
 

This country owes a huge debt of gratitude to Dr M S Swaminathan, the legendary agricultural scientist and the key architect of the Green Revolution that converted a food-shortage country into a food-surplus country in less than a decade.

How did this miracle happen? How did they convert Indian farmers to adopt new forms of cultivation and new hybrid seeds? Remember there was no internet, television or even wide spread readership of Indian language newspapers.

I was told that the agri-scientist applied what had been espoused in the theory of diffusion of innovation by Everett Rogers. The first edition of the book Diffusion of Innovations was published in 1962 when Rogers was just 31 years of age and was an assistant professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University. The theory explained that not all consumers are equally ready to adopt innovative products. Rogers’ research showed that adopters of any new innovation or idea can be categorised as innovators (2.5 per cent), early adopters (13.5 per cent), early majority (34 per cent), late majority (34 per cent) and laggards (16 per cent). Early work on the theory was done on two categories of products — hybrid seeds [farmers] and antibiotics [doctors]. It is reported that this book was one of the top two most quoted in the field of social sciences.

Remember we are talking about India of the 1960s. An agri-scientist cannot possibly convince a farmer to adopt an unknown method of farming. They will probably get beaten black and blue by the tough Indian farmer. What Dr Swaminathan’s team did was to identify opinion leaders in key village clusters. They then got these opinion leaders, maybe the mukhia of the big landlords, to give them a small plot of land. These were the “test plots”; in these test plots, agri-scientists planted the new hybrid seeds and got the villagers to monitor the progress. Low and behold, a few weeks or months later, the result was there for all to see. The trick was not to try and convert everyone in one sweep but to go after the potential “innovators”. Even with them don’t ask for the whole landholding, just a test plot. By adopting this gentle nudging method they managed to spread the good word about the new hybrid seeds within a few years. What happened then was a tsunami of farmers clamouring for the new miracle “beej”. And the rest is history. India’s foodgrain production increased from around 70 million tonnes in 1966 to around 120 million tonnes in 1976; it kept climbing and reached 176 million tonnes by 2000.

The adoption of hybrid seeds by Indian farmers was not an accident, but it was through the application of a well-designed consumer strategy. Can all products and services take this approach? Academic research is a little lean on this. Often adoption behaviour is explained post-facto. After a product has been adopted it is easy to find out who adopted it early and who came late to the party. But if I am launching a new product or service, it is very difficult to identify the innovators and early adopters and beam my messages to them. In this regard, Indian agri-scientists managed to identify the right target to convert, the opinion leaders in village clusters. For those who want to understand the adoption of technology products the book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore is a good guide.

Many government policy interventions can benefit from the diffusion of innovation theory. 
 

Getting people to pay their income taxes on time. Getting urban citizens to keep their city clean. Getting more childless couples to adopt orphans. Getting more people to donate their organs. I can go on. The question is who will be the innovators and early adopters in each of these categories. I remember discussing the challenge of raising funds for an orphanage with a non-governmental organisation. They were emphatic that their best source were women and hence they spent their limited budgets on women portals. Could they have gone a little more narrow in defining their innovators? Can it be girls in senior years in colleges? Can they be targeted better?

As the year 2023 drew to a close I was left with many of these thoughts as I remembered the way Indian farmers were convinced to use hybrid seeds and the tremendous contribution made by Dr Swaminathan to help India become a net food grain exporter.

Ambi Parameswaran is a bestselling author and founder of Brand-Building.com a brand advisory. He can be reached at ambimgp@brand-building.com