The green revolution was the strategy, adopted in India from the mid-1960s, of raising foodgrain output by concentrating a package of modern inputs in selected well-endowed districts. Its components were interdependent: high-yielding varieties of wheat and later rice, assured irrigation (increasingly private tubewells), chemical fertiliser and pesticide, mechanisation, institutional credit, and a state guarantee of demand through minimum support prices and public procurement. Sociologically, the significant fact is not the seed but the package — because access to it was unequally distributed, a technical intervention became an instrument of class formation.
The policy shift followed the food crises and import dependence of the mid-1960s, and it was deliberately selective. The Intensive Agricultural District Programme and the New Agricultural Strategy directed resources to areas with existing irrigation and enterprising cultivators, on the reasoning that output, not equity, was the emergency. Critics called this betting on the strong — a phrase that captures its social logic exactly.
Regional concentration
The revolution was regionally narrow. Wheat in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh — canal-irrigated, consolidated, commercially oriented — accounted for the bulk of early gains, later joined by coastal Andhra Pradesh and parts of Tamil Nadu and, much later, by rice in eastern India. Dryland tracts of the Deccan and the rain-fed east were largely bypassed, because the package presupposed water control. The result was a widening of inter-regional inequality alongside national self-sufficiency in cereals, and a lasting bias towards wheat and rice at the expense of pulses, millets and oilseeds.
Differentiation and polarisation
The classic sociological debate concerned distribution. The new technology was scale-neutral but not resource-neutral: divisible inputs could in principle be used on any holding, but tubewells, tractors and credit favoured those with capital. Francine Frankel (1971) argued that economic gains were purchased at a political cost — rising tensions in the very districts that prospered. Biplab Dasgupta (1977) and T. J. Byres (1981) documented the resulting differentiation: rich and upper-middle peasants captured the surplus, poor peasants adopted inputs without the staying power to survive a bad year, and the distance between the poles widened. Others, including G. S. Bhalla and G. K. Chadha, found that small Punjab peasants did adopt the new inputs and raise yields substantially, so that absolute incomes rose even as relative inequality grew. Both findings can be true, and the sophisticated answer holds them together.
Tenants, wage labour and the rise of the proprietor
The most decisive social consequences ran through the labour relation. As cultivation became profitable, owners resumed land for self-cultivation and evicted tenants and sharecroppers, converting them into wage workers — reform legislation intended to protect tenants frequently accelerated this. Demand for hired labour rose sharply, drawing seasonal migrants from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh into Punjab and creating the mobile workforce later studied as footloose labour. Older attached, patron-client ties gave way to cash wages and impersonal, seasonal contracts: more monetised, less secure, and stripped of customary obligation.
Above this labour force consolidated the middle-peasant proprietor — the self-cultivating owner of a viable, irrigated, market-oriented holding, typically from a dominant landowning caste. This class turned agricultural surplus into tractors and trucks, then into shops, mills, education and political office, becoming the new rural power elite whose organisations mobilised around procurement prices, power tariffs, fertiliser subsidies and loan waivers. Since it hired wage labour, invested for profit and responded to markets, many scholars read its emergence as evidence of capitalist farming in Indian agriculture — the empirical core of the mode-of-production debate.
Ecological and human costs
Vandana Shiva's The Violence of the Green Revolution (1991) reframed the achievement as ecological and social violence: monoculture replacing crop diversity, loss of indigenous varieties, and dependence on purchased seed and chemicals. Groundwater tables in central Punjab and Haryana have fallen severely under a paddy-wheat rotation unsuited to the region's rainfall; soils show declining response to fertiliser; pesticide residues in water and food have been linked to serious health problems; and residue burning contributes to north Indian air pollution. Rising input costs against uncertain output prices produced the indebtedness at the heart of the agrarian crisis, including in the region the revolution had made prosperous. Surinder Jodhka (2006) argues that Punjab's distress is not merely economic but a crisis of social reproduction — of aspiration, mobility and the meaning of farming for a generation that no longer wishes to farm.
Second green revolution debates
Proposals for a second green revolution — extension to eastern India, genetically modified crops, micro-irrigation, contract farming and market reform — reproduce the original argument in new terms. Critics counter with an evergreen revolution, in M. S. Swaminathan's phrase: productivity without ecological damage, through millets, agro-ecology, water-budgeting and diversification. The sociological question is unchanged — who controls the technology, and who bears its risk.
For the UPSC answer
Treat the green revolution as a package, and make its unequal accessibility the hinge of your argument: scale-neutral but not resource-neutral. Deploy the debate explicitly — Frankel and Byres on polarisation against Bhalla and Chadha on small-peasant adoption — and resolve it by distinguishing absolute gains from relative inequality. The strongest answers link the four consequences that examiners reward: tenant eviction, growth of wage labour, the new middle-peasant elite and capitalist farming. Close with the ecological and reproduction crisis via Shiva and Jodhka, and evaluate second-revolution proposals against it.
References & further reading
- Frankel, F. R. (1971). India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs. Princeton University Press.
- Dasgupta, B. (1977). Agrarian Change and the New Technology in India. Geneva: UNRISD.
- Byres, T. J. (1981). The New Technology, Class Formation and Class Action in the Indian Countryside. Journal of Peasant Studies, 8(4).
- Bhalla, G. S. and Chadha, G. K. (1983). Green Revolution and the Small Peasant: A Study of Income Distribution in Punjab Agriculture. New Delhi: Concept.
- Shiva, V. (1991). The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. Zed Books.
- Jodhka, S. S. (2006). Beyond ‘Crises’: Rethinking Contemporary Punjab Agriculture. Economic and Political Weekly, 41(16).