When green revolution seeds with a narrow genetic base were spread rapidly over a vast part of the agricultural land of India and several other developing countries, they displaced a vast diversity of local crops and crop-varieties.
It transformed India to self-reliance from a ship-tomouth existence. But the Green Revolution was not an unmixed blessing. Over the decades which followed, it sowed the seeds of its own destruction, leading to a grave farming crisis in the country.
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, fondly known as MS Swaminathan, who passed away in Chennai on Thursday, was the driving force behind India's Green Revolution.
The Green Revolution made India self-sufficient in foodgrains production and a leading exporter, but it is a tragic paradox that…
Indian Oil has declared 2023 as the year of strengthening the green resolve. With this theme in target the IOC has taken a resolve to achieve a 20 per cent ethanol blending target throughout the nation by 2025.
Despite years of neglect, India continues to be the largest producer of millet in the world. Compared to water-guzzling cereals like rice and wheat, its yield is low, but it has higher nutritional value.
Instead of imposing policies and programmes on the farmers in the name of development, there is a need to help farmers in availing inputs at a reasonable price and disposing of their produce at a remunerative price.
The Green Revolution was indeed a package deal, a combination of radical changes in the political economy of Indian agriculture, with several path-breaking interventions. The technology of the Green Revolution involved bio-engineered seeds that worked in conjunction with chemical fertilizers and heavy irrigation to increase crop yields. It also produced significant social and political changes in Indian villages.
Our self-sufficiency in food grain production has been achieved through the pursuit of exploitative agricultural practices in the name of the Green Revolution, which laid emphasis on the production of two water-intensive crops rice and wheat. It has wrested areas from coarse cereals, pulses and oilseeds and left a trail of ecological hazards depletion of soil nutrients, biodiversity, resurgence of pests and plant diseases, creation of salinity and water logging.
Carrying capacity itself is a well-known and widely accepted concept in ecology. It is a basic idea relating to sustainability. It often serves as a basis of sustainable development policies that attempts to balance the needs of today against the resources that will be needed in the future.
