The Green Revolution and rural change

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Green Revolution transformed farming in parts of India. It used:

• high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds of wheat and rice;
• chemical fertilisers and pesticides;
• assured irrigation, which the new seeds needed.

It was introduced mainly in irrigated areas: Punjab, western U.P., coastal Andhra Pradesh and parts of Tamil Nadu.

Gains: food production rose sharply, and India became self-sufficient in foodgrains.

But the gains were uneven, a process sociologists call differentiation:

• Medium and large farmers, who could afford the inputs, gained most; the rich grew richer.
• Tenants were often displaced, as owners took back land to farm it profitably themselves.
• Mono-cropping (growing one crop) raised the risk of failure.
• Regional inequality grew between Green Revolution areas and the rest.
• Traditional seed varieties, adapted to local conditions, were lost.

Changing labour relations: payment shifted from grain to cash, and labour became 'free' wage labour without old ties. The sociologist Jan Breman called this a move 'from patronage to exploitation': the old landlord–labourer bond, unequal but with some obligations, gave way to purely commercial relations. Farming became capitalist, growing for the market, not just for the family (as subsistence farmers do).

Dominant-caste farmers who prospered diversified into business and moved to towns. In Kerala, the rural economy now rests largely on remittances from workers in the Gulf.

The Green Revolution brought growth without equity.