Critically examine Green Revolution as a strategy for sustainable agricultural development. (2012)
The Green Revolution — the New Agricultural Strategy of 1966 — was designed to end a food emergency, not to build a durable farming system. Judged on food security it succeeded; judged on water, soil and equity it borrowed against the future. Its own chief scientist saw this early: in 1968 M. S. Swaminathan warned that “exploitive agriculture” pursued for immediate output would end in desertification.
The strategy at its strongest
- A package, not a seed: semi-dwarf wheats bred in Mexico by Norman Borlaug (Nobel Peace Prize, 1970) and IRRI’s IR-8 rice, adapted at IARI by Swaminathan and carried through Cabinet by Food Minister C. Subramaniam, who imported about 18,000 tonnes of Mexican seed in 1966.
- Institutions made adoption rational: the Agricultural Prices Commission (1965) set support prices and the Food Corporation of India (1965) procured at them, so a bumper harvest no longer meant a price collapse.
- Results: foodgrain output rose from about 50.8 million tonnes (1950-51) to a record 376.56 million tonnes (third advance estimates, 2025-26); PL-480 “ship-to-mouth” dependence ended; droughts since 1966 produced no famine; procured stocks underwrite the National Food Security Act, 2013.
- In one sense this is sustainability: a quadrupled population fed from domestic land, with yield growth sparing forest and pasture.
The ecological critique
- Groundwater mining: the CGWB’s 2025 assessment puts the stage of extraction at 156.36% in Punjab, 147.11% in Rajasthan and 136.75% in Haryana, against 60.63% nationally; 730 of 6,762 assessment units are over-exploited. Free farm power removed the last brake.
- Soil fatigue: price-controlled urea skews the NPK ratio; zinc and sulphur deficiencies and falling organic carbon follow, and grain obtained per kilogram of nutrient has dropped from roughly ten to three or four — the signature of an exhausted technology.
- Paddy-wheat monoculture in a semi-arid state brings stubble burning and Delhi’s winter smog; genetic erosion replaced thousands of rice landraces with a few uniform varieties.
- Vandana Shiva, in The Violence of the Green Revolution (1991), makes the critique epistemic: laboratory science displaced peasant knowledge, bought seed replaced saved seed, and polyculture yielded to what she later called “monocultures of the mind”.
The equity critique
- Betting on the strong: gains concentrated in irrigated Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, while eastern and rain-fed India — roughly half the net sown area — stayed outside.
- Tenants were evicted as self-cultivation became profitable; the cereal bias displaced pulses and millets, which is why grain surpluses coexist with stunting of 35.5% of under-fives (NFHS-5).
The counter-case
- The counterfactual: Shiva does not show what would have fed the 1970s population; the alternative was import dependence or hunger.
- Many costs flow from policy, not agronomy — free electricity, urea pricing, open-ended paddy procurement — and are reversible: Punjab’s 2009 subsoil-water law delaying transplanting, micro-irrigation and crop-neutral support.
- G. S. Bhalla and G. K. Chadha found small farmers adopted the divisible seed-fertiliser inputs at rates close to large ones.
Conclusion
The Green Revolution was sustainable as an emergency strategy and unsustainable as a permanent model. Its yield science remains indispensable; its incentives — free water, cheap nitrogen, two procured cereals — are the problem. Swaminathan’s own “evergreen revolution”, productivity without ecological harm, is the correction the strategy always needed.