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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Green No More -NK Bhoopesh
-Tehelka

In these times of agrarian distress, NK Bhoopesh revisits the ‘revolution’ that changed Indian agriculture

The growing number of farmer suicides across the country has punched holes in the dominant narrative of India’s rise as a global economic power articulated ad nauseum by big business, mainstream politicians and the corporate media. It has also put a question mark on another familiar tale: that the green revolution introduced in the 1960s was an unmitigated success.

With Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and other states in the grip of agrarian crisis, it is time to revisit the revolution that many thought would end India’s agricultural problems once and for all. Data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau reveals that 2,25,000 farmers committed suicide in India between 2000 and 2013. During the same period, India’s foodgrain production rose from 211.32 million tonne in 2001-02 to 264.38 million tonne in 2013-14. The apparent paradox of farmers being forced to kill themselves alongside a steady rise in food production lays bare the limits of the policies that made India self-reliant in food in the 1970s.

So, was the green revolution, which catapulted India to self-sufficiency in food, actually a failed revolution?

Haunted by the worst food crisis in the history of the subcontinent — the Bengal Famine of 1943 that killed 30 lakh people — India was reeling under acute food shortage in the years after Independence. The government led by the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru sought to tide over the crisis by importing wheat from the US under the Public Law 480 (PL 480). The PL 480 enabled India, which did not have enough foreign currency to buy foodgrain from the world market, to pay for the imports in rupees. It was, however, a humiliating experience as the US was using the programme as a tool to further its geopolitical agenda in the newly independent Third World countries. Moreover, the imported wheat was of poor quality.

Persistent criticism from several quarters forced the Nehru government to realise that there was no alternative to self-reliance in food. The easiest way to go about it without bringing in radical changes in the production relations in agriculture — determined by the nature of land ownership and land tenure — was to apply a technological fix with more than a little help from institutions such as the World Bank and the Ford Foundation.

The first step in that direction was taken by the then minister of food and agriculture Chidambaram Subramaniam when he invited Norman Borlaugh, an American biologist and Nobel laureate who has been called “the father of the green revolution”, to India and sought his advice on introducing high-yield varieties (HYV) of seeds in selected areas. Borlaugh had already demonstrated how HYV seeds coupled with modern farming techniques could help drastically hike crop yields in Mexico.

Punjab, which was fortunate to have a dense network of irrigation canals constructed during the British Raj, was chosen as the first laboratory in India where Borlaugh’s ideas would be put to test. The mix of HYV seeds and modern techniques indeed led to a jump in production and in the following years the programme was expanded to include Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and some other parts of the country. The crop area under the high-yield varieties grew from seven percent to 22 percent during the first 10 years of what came to be known as the green revolution.

Though the programme was launched using imported seeds, later the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) developed HYV seeds not only for wheat and rice but also millet and corn. The green revolution in India came to be widely acclaimed as a success story, surpassing similar experiments in many other Third World countries. Yield per hectare improved by more than 30 percent between 1950 and 1979. In 1978-79, foodgrain production touched 13 crore tonne and India went on to become a foodgrain-exporting country. More than 70 percent of the wheat crop area and 35 percent of the rice crop area came under HYV cultivation.

It was not just HYV seeds that helped India script the success story. HYV cultivation needed infrastructural support from the government and so public expenditure in agriculture and allied areas was increased during that period. Apart from building new dams and irrigation facilities, the government provided fertilisers and pesticides at subsidised rates. This proactive involvement of the government helped India overcome the food crisis.

The success of the green revolution is conventionally measured in terms of the increase in production. But social scientists differ on how much the increased yield helped in battling hunger. Some of them have criticised the green revolution model for addressing India’s agrarian problem in a purely technological way, ignoring the land relations that are skewed in favour of the landlords and rich farmers. Others have questioned its sustainability citing its ecological fallout.

Social scientists who have analysed the green revolution’s impact have concluded that small and marginal farmers did not benefit as much as the landlords and rich farmers because of their poor access to resources. Moreover, as the programme took for granted the lopsided land relations prevalent wherever it was implemented, it ended up accelerating the process of economic polarisation in both rural and urban settings.

GS Bhalla of Punjab University writes in Changing Structure of Agriculture in Haryana: A Study of the Impact of the Green Revolution that the introduction of HYV wheat and rice shifted the distribution of the operated land in favour of rich farmers with large landholdings. Other studies have found that between 1970 and 1980 many small landholdings in Punjab were wiped out because the poor farmers tilling them could not cope with the increasingly capital-intensive nature of agriculture. They just didn’t have the resources to benefit from the changes brought about by the green revolution. Many of them were crushed under the burden of debt incurred because of the high input costs of HYV cultivation. On the other hand, those who had excess land to pledge as collateral managed to get bank loans, used it to procure inputs and hire labourers, and made enough profit to pay back their debt. This widened the gap between the rich farmers and the others dependent on agriculture.

In her seminal work How the Other Half Dies, French-American social scientist Susan George writes: “There seems to be little doubt, however, that aside from its [green revolution] contributions to the profit side of MNC business ledgers, it has also been viewed by the various American interest pushing it as an alternative to land reform and to the social change reform would require. Since land reform is the only other way to increase food production, these experts are willing to settle for the lesser of the two evils.” She went on to argue that “western interests introduced the revolution to sell inputs but also to promote social stability through increased food production and the strengthening of a middle-class peasantry in nations they saw as threatened by ‘communism’”.

Others have argued that the green revolution was part of a political project aimed at expanding US interests in the Third World countries. They believe that Indian scientists working on self-reliant and ecologically sound alternatives for the regeneration of agriculture were given a raw deal at the behest of agencies such as the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Environmental activist Vandana Shiva who authored The Violence of the Green Revolution argues that international agencies saw the intensification of agricultural production as a means of stabilising the countryside and defusing the call for a wider redistribution of land and other resources. She says that ‘high-yield varieties’ is a misnomer as the distinguishing feature of these seeds is something else: they are highly responsive to key inputs such as fertilisers and irrigation.

Another criticism of the green revolution is that the mind-boggling diversity of local varieties of rice and wheat in many parts of the country was lost because of the growing reliance on HYV seeds. This partly explains the continuing distress of farmers even in areas where the green revolution was hailed as a success.

According to a study conducted jointly by Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, and Punjab University, Patiala, 6,926 farmers committed suicide between 2000 and 2011 in Punjab. Among the dead were 4,686 farmers who were in debt. This year, too, many deaths have been reported from Punjab and western UP.

According to some political activists working among farmers, recent policy changes have aggravated all the problems associated with the green revolution. According to Vijoo Krishnan, joint secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha, the green revolution had succeeded despite its limitations because of proactive government intervention in providing subsidised fertilisers, pesticides and seeds to farmers. However, with neoliberal economics guiding the policies of the Centre and the states since the mid-1980s, subsidies in agriculture have been frowned upon and progressively reduced. Moreover, says Krishnan, the government has done little to help the farmers to recuperate the soil that has lost its fertility due to excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides under the rubric of the green revolution. All these factors have combined to sound the death-knell for a large section of the peasantry.

Despite the different perceptions on the green revolution, two things stand out. It heralded India’s self-sufficiency in food production, but the increase in production alone was not enough to end agrarian distress. The number of farmers killing themselves skyrocketed after the introduction of neoliberal policies, including cuts in government expenditure on agriculture and reduction in subsidies to farmers. With the present regime gunning to go much further in the same direction, the Indian farmer has little to look forward to.