The Green Revolution

By the mid-1960s, India was heavily dependent on food grain imports and had faced serious food shortages. The response was a deliberate package of agricultural technology, introduced from the mid-1960s onward and generally referred to as the Green Revolution.

What the package consisted of. The Green Revolution was not a single innovation but a combination of complementary inputs that had to be adopted together to work: high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds (developed for crops such as wheat and, to a lesser extent, rice), chemical fertilisers used in much larger quantities than before, assured and controlled irrigation (since HYV seeds needed reliable water supply to perform), and greater use of farm machinery and improved cultivation practices. None of these inputs alone would have produced the same effect — the seeds needed the fertiliser and water, and the water needed irrigation investment.

Its impact. The Green Revolution brought substantial gains in the productivity of the crops and regions it reached, most notably wheat, and it played an important part in moving India from a food-deficit country dependent on imports toward much greater self-sufficiency in food grains over time. States and regions with assured irrigation — parts of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh being the most commonly cited examples — saw the sharpest gains. …