Breaking down the question
The instruction is to write a note on the uneven impact of the Green Revolution on rural society. The controlling word is "uneven" — the examiner does not want a general account of the Green Revolution but an analysis of how its benefits and costs were distributed unequally across regions, classes, castes and crops.
The Green Revolution, from the mid-1960s, introduced high-yielding seed varieties, chemical fertilisers, assured irrigation and mechanisation. It raised food-grain output dramatically and averted famine. Your task is to show that this technological package, applied within an unequal agrarian structure, tended to widen rather than narrow existing disparities.
How to approach it
Frame the answer around distinct axes of unevenness — regional, class, caste, crop and ecological — after a brief note on what the Green Revolution was. Establish early the sociological argument that a capital-intensive technology grafted onto an unequal structure amplifies inequality. Draw on Francine Frankel's classic study of its political costs, Utsa Patnaik's analysis of emergent capitalist farming, and Beteille's account of agrarian stratification. Our note on the Green Revolution and social change develops the debate.
Model answer
The Green Revolution was a strategy of agricultural modernisation that combined high-yielding varieties of seed, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, assured irrigation and mechanisation to raise food-grain production. It succeeded spectacularly in lifting output and securing the nation against famine. Yet because this technological package was capital-intensive and was introduced into an already unequal agrarian structure, its impact on rural society was profoundly uneven.
Regional unevenness. The new technology depended on assured irrigation, and so its gains concentrated in a few well-endowed regions — Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh — while vast rain-fed and eastern tracts were largely bypassed. This sharpened regional inequality, producing prosperous agrarian belts alongside stagnant ones and widening inter-regional disparities in income and development.
Class unevenness. The package favoured those who could afford seeds, fertiliser, tubewells and machinery. Large and medium landowners captured most of the gains, while small and marginal farmers, lacking capital and credit, benefited little and sometimes lost ground as costs rose. Rising land values and profitability encouraged owners to resume land for self-cultivation, displacing tenants. The result, as Utsa Patnaik argued, was the growth of a class of capitalist farmers producing for the market and employing wage labour — a deepening of agrarian differentiation.
The condition of labour. Mechanisation and the substitution of machines for manual operations displaced agricultural labourers in some tasks even as commercial cultivation raised demand in others. Wages rose in pockets, but the bargaining position of the landless remained weak, and the widening gap between prosperous farmers and labourers heightened rural tension. Francine Frankel warned that this uneven prosperity carried real political risks of unrest.
Caste dimension. Because landownership in India is patterned by caste, the class gains of the Green Revolution largely accrued to dominant landowning castes, while Dalit and lower-caste labourers remained propertyless. The technology thus reinforced the class-caste nexus that Andre Beteille identified at the heart of agrarian stratification, translating economic advantage into consolidated social and political power for the dominant peasantry.
Crop and ecological unevenness. The revolution was confined largely to wheat and rice, neglecting pulses, coarse grains and dryland crops on which the poor depend. Over time, intensive input use brought ecological costs — falling water tables, soil degradation and rising indebtedness from expensive inputs — burdens borne disproportionately by smaller cultivators.
A dynamic but unequal transformation. The Green Revolution did modernise agriculture and created a confident, market-oriented farming class that later became a powerful political force through farmers' movements. But this very success was selective. It raised aggregate production while concentrating gains, so that the countryside became more, not less, differentiated.
In sum, the Green Revolution's impact was uneven along every major axis — region, class, caste, crop and ecology. By grafting a capital-intensive technology onto an unequal structure, it boosted output and food security yet widened the distances within rural society, confirming that technological change is refracted through, and tends to reproduce, existing social inequalities.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners expect candidates to move beyond the achievement of food security and confront the word "uneven" directly. A top answer names the distinct axes — regional, class, caste, crop, ecological — and explains why a capital-intensive package deepened inequality within a stratified structure.
Deploying Frankel on political risk, Patnaik on capitalist farming and Beteille on the class-caste nexus gives the answer analytical authority. Concrete detail — the concentration in Punjab and Haryana, tenant displacement, the neglect of pulses — strengthens the case. Weak scripts either praise the Green Revolution uncritically or reduce it to an environmental complaint; strong ones hold together its gains and its unequal distribution in disciplined, well-structured prose with British spelling.