Arthur T. Mosher

Arthur Mosher (1910 to 1992) was an American agriculture development specialist who was president of the Agricultural Development Council and principal of the Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences in India, which was then called Allahabad Agricultural Institute. From Ames, Iowa, he received degrees in agriculture and agricultural economics from the University of Illinois and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago, and in the 1930s he served on a Presbyterian Church mission to India. As principal he is credited with leading a period of major expansion and with the extension project known as Jamuna Par Punar yojna, which recruited workers at the village level. He was executive director of the Agricultural Development Council from 1957 to 1967 and its president from 1967 to 1973. His 1965 book Getting Agriculture Moving was translated into many languages and promoted the modernization theory typical of the aid approach of its time.