Breaking down the question
The word critique is the pivot of this question. It does not ask you to describe the Green Revolution or to celebrate its achievements, but to interrogate the victory narratives — the triumphant accounts that credit it with rescuing India from famine and delivering food self-sufficiency. Your task is to expose what those narratives conceal.
The phrase in the context of Indian society directs you towards social consequences rather than mere agronomic output. You must show that a productivity success may simultaneously be a social problem, generating inequality, regional imbalance and ecological strain even as it fills granaries.
How to approach it
Acknowledge the genuine achievement briefly and fairly: the Green Revolution did raise wheat and rice yields dramatically and helped avert food crises. This concession earns credibility for the critique that follows.
Then organise the critique along several axes. Regionally, the gains concentrated in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, bypassing the rain-fed and eastern regions and widening inter-regional disparity. Along class lines, the new technology favoured farmers with capital, irrigation and access to credit, deepening agrarian differentiation between capitalist farmers and the small peasantry. Ecologically, intensive input use degraded soils, depleted groundwater and locked farmers into costly input dependence. Draw on Francine Frankel on the political economy of the Green Revolution and T. J. Byres on differentiation.
Keep the answer tight and argument-driven, since it carries only ten marks. See our note on Green Revolution and social change for supporting detail.
Model answer
The victory narratives of the Green Revolution present it as an unambiguous triumph — the technological package of high-yielding varieties, chemical fertilisers and assured irrigation that transformed India from a food-deficit nation into a self-sufficient producer and banished the spectre of famine. This account is not false, but it is partial, and a sociological reading must critique its silences.
The achievement itself deserves acknowledgement. Wheat and rice yields rose sharply, buffer stocks accumulated, and India escaped the dependence on food imports that had marked the mid-1960s. Yet to stop here is to mistake aggregate output for social progress.
The first fault line is regional. The gains of the Green Revolution concentrated overwhelmingly in the well-irrigated tracts of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, while the rain-fed and eastern regions largely missed out. The result was a widening of inter-regional disparity, as a prosperous agrarian belt pulled away from a stagnating hinterland.
The second fault line is class. The new technology was scale-neutral in principle but not in practice, for it demanded capital, credit and irrigation that only the better-off could command. As Francine Frankel and T. J. Byres emphasised, this produced a process of agrarian differentiation, strengthening a class of capitalist farmers who accumulated surplus and hired labour, while small and marginal cultivators struggled with rising input costs. Polarisation, not shared prosperity, was the social outcome.
The third fault line is ecological. Intensive and continuous cultivation, heavy fertiliser and pesticide use, and the mining of groundwater degraded soil fertility, lowered water tables and bound farmers to an expensive and unsustainable input regime. The long-run crisis now visible in Punjab — declining yields, contaminated water and mounting debt — is the delayed bill for the earlier celebration.
A fourth dimension concerns labour and social relations. Mechanisation displaced some forms of agricultural labour, while the monetisation of the rural economy weakened older patron-client ties without securing labourers a stable place in the new order.
In conclusion, the victory narratives capture a real productivity revolution but obscure its uneven and costly social character. The Green Revolution fed the nation while dividing the countryside — regionally, by class and against the environment. A sociological critique does not deny the harvest, but insists on asking who reaped it, who was left behind, and at what long-term cost to land and society.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners reward a balanced critique that first concedes the genuine agronomic success and then dismantles the triumphalist reading along clear analytical axes — region, class and ecology. A one-sided condemnation that ignores the real achievement scores poorly, as does an uncritical celebration.
At ten marks, economy is essential. The strongest answers name the differentiation thesis, cite Frankel or Byres, and point to the contemporary ecological crisis in Punjab as evidence that the costs were deferred rather than absent.