Breaking down the question

The question is a two-part evaluation of the green revolution — the package of high-yielding variety seeds, chemical fertilisers, assured irrigation and mechanisation introduced from the mid-1960s. The first part asks for a balanced ledger of positive and negative social consequences; the second asks the sharper analytical question of how it changed the rural social structure.

The examiner is signalling that a purely economic account of rising food output will not suffice. The sociological interest lies in distribution — who gained, who lost, and how existing hierarchies of land, caste and class were reworked. The phrase social structure directs you to the enduring pattern of relationships among landowners, tenants and labourers, not merely to production figures.

A strong answer therefore treats the green revolution as a social and not only a technological event: a new technology adopted within an unequal agrarian order tends to reproduce and even sharpen that inequality, while simultaneously loosening older bonds and creating new ones.

How to approach it

Structure the answer as a balanced ledger followed by a focused analysis of structural change. A well-organised response will:

  • Present positive consequences — food security, prosperity, new aspirations — without becoming celebratory.
  • Present negative consequences — regional and class disparities, the decline of patron–client ties, ecological strain.
  • Devote a distinct section to structural change: the shift from feudal to capitalist relations, the rise of the rich peasantry and the differentiation of the peasantry.
  • Draw on Francine Frankel's classic study of the political economy of the green revolution and on the wider mode-of-production debate.

For the fuller argument, see our notes on the green revolution and social change.

Model answer

The green revolution transformed Indian agriculture from a subsistence enterprise into a commercial one, and in doing so reshaped rural society. Its consequences were genuinely double-edged.

On the positive side, it delivered food self-sufficiency and freed the country from the humiliation of dependence on food imports. In the well-endowed regions — Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh — it generated real prosperity, raising incomes, spreading pucca housing, mechanised transport and consumer goods, and lifting the aspirations of cultivating households. It monetised the rural economy, stimulated agro-industries and created new employment in trade, transport and services. For a cultivating peasantry long tied to custom, it opened a horizon of accumulation and mobility.

On the negative side, these gains were unequally distributed. Because the new technology required capital — for seeds, fertiliser, tubewells and machinery — it favoured those who already had land and credit. Large and middle farmers captured its benefits, while small and marginal farmers, unable to afford the inputs, fell behind or sold out. The revolution was also regionally selective, confined to irrigated tracts and bypassing the vast dry and rain-fed areas, thereby widening inter-regional disparities. Mechanisation displaced labour in some operations, and the older paternalist obligations of the landlord towards dependent labourers weakened as relations became increasingly cash-based. Ecologically, intensive chemical use and groundwater depletion sowed the seeds of a later crisis.

The deepest impact, however, was on the rural social structure. Here three shifts stand out. First, a transition from semi-feudal to capitalist agriculture: land came to be worked increasingly for profit, with wage labour, purchased inputs and market sale replacing customary tenancy and payment in kind. Francine Frankel's study captured this as a movement from patronage to a market logic. Second, the rise of a class of rich, entrepreneurial farmers — often from the dominant intermediate castes — who consolidated economic power and translated it into political assertion, giving India its influential farmers' lobby. Third, a growing differentiation of the peasantry: the old undifferentiated village community gave way to sharper class lines separating capitalist farmers, a squeezed middle peasantry, and a swelling body of landless wage labourers.

These structural changes had social ripples. The bond between caste status and economic position began to loosen as market success created new hierarchies; but at the same time the concentration of gains among landowning castes reinforced their dominance in many regions. Patron–client ties, the jajmani framework of mutual obligation, decayed as labour was hired and paid in cash. Agrarian tensions grew where the labourers and small tenants who bore the costs confronted the farmers who reaped the gains, feeding rural conflict in several states.

In sum, the green revolution modernised production and enriched some, but it did so within an unequal structure that it ultimately deepened. It replaced a hierarchy based largely on custom with one based increasingly on capital, converting the agrarian order from a status-bound community into a class-differentiated market society.

Examiner's perspective

Examiners look for genuine balance and, above all, for the structural analysis that the second part of the question demands. Scripts that merely list good and bad effects, without explaining the shift from feudal to capitalist relations and the differentiation of the peasantry, remain in the middle band.

The distinction that lifts an answer is the argument that a neutral technology, introduced into an unequal society, tends to magnify that inequality — this is the sociological core. Citing Frankel and locating the answer within the mode-of-production and class-differentiation debates signals theoretical command. The strongest scripts also note the regional and ecological dimensions, showing awareness that the green revolution's later crisis was implicit in its early design. Weak answers celebrate rising output; strong answers analyse the redistribution of social power that accompanied it.