Green Revolution & food security
How India moved from PL-480 dependence to grain self-sufficiency: the Green Revolution, its institutions, regional skew, and the food-security architecture it spawned.
The crisis that forced the choice
Independent India inherited a chronic food deficit. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed an estimated 2.1–3 million people, and the First (1951–56) and Second (1956–61) Five-Year Plans failed to close the gap between population growth and grain output. The successive droughts of 1965 and 1966 pushed India into a 'ship-to-mouth' existence, surviving on wheat imported under the United States' Public Law 480 (the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954). At its peak in 1966, India imported roughly 10 million tonnes of grain, and President Lyndon Johnson's 'short-tether' policy—releasing PL-480 shipments month by month to pressure New Delhi over Vietnam and economic policy—made food a humiliating instrument of foreign leverage.
The technological package
The response was a deliberate shift from the Nehruvian emphasis on institutional reform (land redistribution, cooperatives) toward a technology-and-input strategy. C. Subramaniam, as Minister for Food and Agriculture (1964–67), and agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan championed the import and adaptation of high-yielding semi-dwarf wheat varieties bred by Norman Borlaug at CIMMYT in Mexico—notably Lerma Rojo and Sonora-64. The strategy was first institutionalised as the Intensive Agricultural District Programme (IADP, 1960–61, the 'package programme') and broadened into the Intensive Agricultural Area Programme. From 1966 the High-Yielding Varieties Programme (HYVP) was rolled out across Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.
The Green Revolution rested on four interlocking inputs: HYV seeds, chemical fertilizers (urea, DAP), assured irrigation (tubewells and canal command areas), and assured prices. The price guarantee was institutional: the Agricultural Prices Commission (1965, later the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices) recommended Minimum Support Prices, while the Food Corporation of India (established under the Food Corporations Act, 1964) procured, stored and distributed grain. Wheat output rose from about 12 million tonnes in 1965 to over 26 million tonnes by 1972; India declared a buffer stock and largely ended dependence on PL-480 by the early 1970s.
What the strategy bought, and at what cost
The payoff was strategic autonomy: never again would food be a foreign-policy weapon against India. But the gains were concentrated. The Green Revolution was overwhelmingly a wheat-and-rice phenomenon in well-irrigated, surplus-prone regions—Punjab, Haryana, western UP—deepening regional disparity with the rain-fed east and the dryland Deccan. It favoured larger farmers who could finance inputs, widening rural inequality, and over time produced groundwater depletion, soil salinity, fertilizer overuse and the monoculture that the M. S. Swaminathan Committee on Farmers (2004–06) later warned about. The phrase 'Green Revolution' itself was coined by USAID administrator William Gaud in a March 1968 speech. Understanding both the achievement and its ecological-equity tail is essential to any balanced UPSC answer.
