Paper short abstract:

My paper argues that the initial Tibetan refugee settlements in south India, established in the 1960's and 70's, were intended as Nehruvian local models of small families and scientific and cooperative farming.

Paper long abstract:

In the late 1950's the conflict between Tibet and China and the subsequent Chinese takeover in Tibet resulted in the arrival of a large community of Tibetan refugees in north India. Starting in the early 1960's the Indian government began to settle the refugees in self-subsistent south Indian rural settlements. My paper argues that the settlements presented an opportunity for the Indian government to implement the Nehruvian development model for the modernization of rural India as most clearly envisioned in the government's Third Five Year Plan and bearing the hallmarks of collective farming, mechanized and scientific agriculture, and population control, and that he modern settlements were designed to provide good examples for the surrounding Indian community. Based on the camp registers and archival material from Lukzung Samdrupling, the first Tibetan refugee settlement in south India, the author traces the impact of cooperative, scientific and mechanized farming as well as population control in Lukzung Samdrupling. The data supports the conclusion that the settlement was implemented as part of a Nehruvian national development plan for rural India but also that in practice the refugees were able to balance their role as objects of development with their own agenda through the employment of various evasive strategies.