JUDGMENT

PATHAK, J. - Special leave granted.

2. This appeal by special leave is directed against the judgment and order dated March 28, 1979 of the Patna High Court dismissing a writ petition filed by the appellants. The history of this case records how an ambitious plan devised by the Central Government for accelerating and modernising agricultural development in the villages of India and simultaneously providing employment opportunities to engineers and technically trained personnel has come to grief because of an incomplete perception of the conditions necessary for its success and what seems to be an unfortunate want of determination at governmental level in the States, besides an attitude of banking institutions which, the petitioners say, is frustratingly clinical and wholly unsympathetic to the cause of the project. It is a tragedy in which an entire range of promises and assurances has been poured, but which seems defeated by the circumstance that an appropriate infrastructure has failed to develop. Those who are affected directly, a large number of individual entrepreneurs who involved themselves in the implementation of the scheme, found an inadequate response to the aspirations with which they had started out and as disillusionment set in they find themselves not only deep in the mire of vocational distress but also heavily burdened with increasing financial obligation.

3. Several years ago, in 1971 the Government of India in the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Community Development and Cooperation propounded a scheme through its Directorate of Extension for the creation of Agro Service Centres in rural areas which would provide technical services essential for accelerated rural development by harnessing the energies of, and thus providing employment to, engineers and technically trained personnel. The scheme was intended to provide in-service training, liberalised loans, subsidised interest rates and assistance in establishing and running of Agro Service Centres. The benefit envisaged for the agricultural community lay in providing for farmers the means to adopt intensive farming through the use of high yielding varieties and multiple cropping by mechanising some of the agricultural operations. It was realised that the period between the harvesting of one crop and the sowing of the next was so brief that the use of equipment could alone ensure three crops even in irrigated areas. The small and medium farmers, who form the bulk of the farming community, had not taken to the modernisation of agricultural methods and had yet to realise the full advantage of new technological perspectives. Their means did not allow the possession and operation of costly equipment and it was thought that a range of machinery servicing and hiring facilities would prove of great assistance to them. The problem was a vast one, extending over the entire State and permeating substantially the entire agricultural economy of the country. The solution was seen in an extensive organisation providing technical services of machinery on hire, of machinery repairs and of input supplies. It was also a solution for alleviating the growing unemployment among technical personnel. Under the scheme, engineers and entrepreneurs would be assisted in the establishment of workshops in the rural areas for repair, maintenance and hiring of agricultural machinery such as tractors, drilling rigs, plant protection and irrigation equipment and for taking up allied activities as the sale of spare parts and inputs which would provide added income and work. Necessarily financial assistance had to be provided for creating an appropriate infrastructure, and an investment ranging from Rs 50,000 to Rs 2,00,000 was considered suitable depending upon the type and size of activities to be met by the entrepreneurs out of loans taken from the State Bank of India, nationalised banks and other financial institutions. It was also envisaged that appropriate assistance in this regar