In 1952, India launched a massive and enthusiastic effort to reach the 360 million people in its 550,000 villages with a national program of economic and social reconstruction. Known as Community Development, the program provided an innovative model of rural development for both Third World nations and the aid-giving countries of the West. Although the program achieved its goal of providing service coverage to the nation, its many implementation problems and the lack of quantifiable cost-effectiveness led critics to label it a failure and resulted in its submergence into the Ministry of Food...