Land Resources and Agriculture
Agricultural development since Independence
Explain the gains and limits of the Green Revolution.
Partition took away about a third of the irrigated land of undivided India. So the early aims after independence were to grow more food crops, use land more intensively, and bring more area under farming.
In the late 1950s, production stagnated. The government started the Intensive Agricultural District Programme (IADP) and the Intensive Agricultural Area Programme (IAAP). Then the droughts of the mid-1960s forced India to import food.
The Green Revolution followed: high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of wheat from Mexico and rice from the Philippines, with chemical fertilisers, in irrigated areas. India became self-reliant in food grains.
At first it was limited to irrigated areas like Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, which created regional disparities. It spread east in the 1970s. Agro-climatic planning, which plans farming by region, began in 1988.
Fertiliser use has risen about 15 times since the mid-1960s. Today, schemes like the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA) and organic farming aim at sustainability.
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