Q.What is the Green Revolution? Explain its impact on Indian agriculture.

The Green Revolution was a package of agricultural inputs introduced from the mid-1960s to raise India's food-grain productivity.

The Green Revolution refers to the package of agricultural technology introduced in India from the mid-1960s, combining high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, increased chemical fertiliser use, assured and controlled irrigation, and greater farm mechanisation. These inputs were complementary — HYV seeds needed reliable irrigation and higher fertiliser doses to deliver their higher yield potential, so the package had to be adopted together to be effective.

Impact. The Green Revolution produced substantial productivity gains, most notably in wheat, and played a central role in reducing India's dependence on food-grain imports, moving the country toward much greater self-sufficiency in food grains over subsequent decades. States and regions with assured irrigation infrastructure — Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh are the most commonly cited examples — captured the largest share of these gains.

Limitations. The impact was not evenly spread: regions without adequate irrigation saw far smaller benefits, and the technology package favoured a narrow set of crops (chiefly wheat) over pulses, oilseeds and many coarse cereals, altering India's overall cropping pattern. Over the longer term, intensive and continuous use of chemical fertilisers and irrigation in Green Revolution belts also raised concerns about soil degradation, declining soil fertility from monocropping, and groundwater depletion. The Green Revolution is therefore best understood as a major, real, but geographically and crop-wise uneven transformation with genuine environmental costs, not an unqualified universal success.

Students often describe the Green Revolution as uniformly benefiting all of Indian agriculture — it is important to specify that its gains were concentrated in irrigated regions and in wheat, and to mention its environmental limitations honestly rather than presenting it as a purely positive development.