34 SOCIAL SCIENTIST mendations made by a Ford Foundation team set up in collaboration with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to study India's food problem.8 The Ford Foundation team recommended that fertilizer industry should be accorded a much higher priority in the five year plans than in the past and that expansion of the industry be done with the assistance of private investors. The response of the foreign interests to this suggestion was the proposal put forth by an American consortium for setting up five fertilizer plants in the co'mtry. The consortium was headed by the chemical giant, Bechtel Corporation, and among its members were several major oil companies like Shell which already had commercial ventures in India.9 These oil companies had undertaken expansions in their petroleum refining capacities during this period and were looking for a market for the products, when Bechtel Corporation came up with its idea. The Bechtel consortium's idea, which was called the "massive fertilizer programme", visualized having the government of India as a partner. The consortium's final negotiating position demanded 55 per cent ownership for the private interests, and, as the Americans saw it, the non-acceptance of majority foreign ownership by the government was the main reason for the subsequent breakdown of the negotiations between the two sides.10 But the reason behind the failure of the Bechtel Corporation getting its proposal accepted by the government appears to be the inability of the American group to exert sustained pressure on the Indian government. The problem arose because some of the members of the consortium found that their long-term commercial interests in India would be jeopardized. This was the most significant reason behind Shell's withdrawal. The oil giant, which also had some interests in the pesticides field, found that Bechtel consortium's "massive fertilizer programme" would ultimately reach out to the pesticides industry as well and would therefore challenge its dominant position in the industry. The position taken by the government of India against the Bechtel consortium can thus be viewed as a response to the inability of the foreign interests to buttress their strength, but this position of strength of the host government did not remain very long. The Bechtel consortium was backed up by other pressure groups, the USAID and the World Bank being the leading ones. These groups were not involved actively in the negotiations which Bechtel consortium was having with the government of India, but the refusal by the latter to accept the former's terms prompted them to intervene directly in the fertilizer industry. The pressures exerted by these organization^ were principally on two fronts. The first was the insistence on their part that the Indian government should change its policies so that the investment climate in the fertilizer industry became more favourable for foreign investors. The second was in response to a development that had taken place in the Indian fertilizer industry. By the mid-1960's, it appeared for the first timethat for the expansion of the industry the country did not have to rely entirely on the transnational corporations as an indigenous technology base had developed in the fertilizer industry. The technological development in the Indian fertilizer industry was car-