'Green Revolution' in India was expeditiously feasible in zones of

Correct — C, (c) Assured irrigation.

The Green Revolution was not a seed on its own but a package, and water was the part of it that could not be improvised. The high-yielding varieties introduced from the middle 1960s — the dwarf Mexican wheats first, and later the new rices — repay heavy applications of chemical fertiliser with much larger harvests, but only if water reaches the field in the right quantity at the right stage of the crop. Too little at flowering and the yield collapses; too much at the wrong time and the fertiliser is wasted or the crop is lost. A cultivator can buy seed and fertiliser in a season, and cannot conjure a canal or a tubewell in one; so the new technology went first to the tracts where water was already under control.

That is why the revolution in India was concentrated in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, where canal systems and tubewells gave farmers water they could count on and apply when they chose, and where the increase in foodgrain production was accordingly greatest. Assured irrigation is the condition the keyed option names, and it is the accurate one.

The contrast with rainfall is the heart of the item. Rain is seasonal, uneven between years and uncontrollable within a season, and a package that depends on precise watering cannot be built on it. A region may receive a great deal of rain and still be a poor candidate for high-yielding varieties, because what the technology needs is not a quantity of water but command over its timing. Irrigation supplies that; rainfall of any amount does not.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)High rainfall — ‘High rainfall’ confuses the amount of water with control over it. India’s wettest tracts — the north-east, the coastal strips, much of the eastern rice belt — were not where the new technology first took hold, and some of them remained outside it for a long time. Heavy rain arrives in a few months, varies sharply from year to year, and can flood a field as easily as water it; none of that suits a crop that must be irrigated on a schedule and fertilised to match. There is also a practical obstacle in such regions: waterlogging and poor drainage limit what fertiliser can do. The option is a reasonable first guess for a candidate who thinks of the Green Revolution as being about water in general, and the correction is to remember that it was about water on demand.
• (b)Moderate rainfall — ‘Moderate rainfall’ fails for the same reason as the option before it, and adds nothing by moderating the quantity: a middling amount of rain is still rain that falls when it chooses. The Green Revolution districts of Punjab and Haryana are not especially wet; what distinguishes them is canal irrigation and tubewells, which is precisely the point the item is making. A note for anybody comparing the two columns of the booklet: the Hindi column of this option does not say the same thing as the English one, printing instead a phrase that reads as low or weak rainfall rather than moderate rainfall. The English column, reproduced above, is the one this card follows, and on either reading the option is wrong for the same reason — rainfall is not assured water.
• (d)Higher population density — ‘Higher population density’ names a social fact rather than an agricultural condition, and the pattern of adoption contradicts it. Some of the most densely populated agricultural districts in the country, in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, were slow to take up the new varieties, while Punjab, with a smaller and less dense rural population, led the way. Dense population can even work against the package, since it goes with very small and fragmented holdings, and a farmer with a fraction of a hectare has difficulty financing a tubewell, buying fertiliser on credit or securing a marketable surplus. The option is worth pausing on because it points at a real feature of Indian agriculture — the pressure of population on land — which is simply not the variable that decided where the Green Revolution succeeded.

The Green Revolution in India was a technological and institutional change of the late 1960s and 1970s that raised foodgrain output sharply, chiefly in wheat.

Its technical core was the high-yielding variety: short-stemmed wheats bred in Mexico, and later the new rices from the International Rice Research Institute, which put their energy into grain rather than straw and stood up under heavy fertilisation. Around that seed came a package — chemical fertiliser, pesticides, assured irrigation and, in time, tractors, threshers and pumps — none of which worked properly without the others.

Its institutional side mattered as much. Price support and assured procurement gave farmers the confidence to invest; a public agency built buffer stocks; agricultural universities, extension services and subsidised credit carried the technology into the districts. Indian agricultural science, associated above all with M.S. Swaminathan, adapted the imported material to Indian conditions.

The results and the criticisms are both examinable. Foodgrain output rose and imports fell, but the gains were concentrated in the well-irrigated north-west, widening the gap between regions and between large and small farmers; the emphasis on wheat and rice narrowed the cropping pattern; and the intensive use of water and chemicals has left problems of falling water tables, soil condition and input subsidies that Indian agricultural policy is still working through.

Key facts

• The Green Revolution package combined high-yielding varieties with chemical fertiliser, pesticides and assured irrigation; the seed gives its extra yield only when water and nutrients are controlled.
• It spread first and furthest in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, where canal irrigation and tubewells provided water on demand.
• Wheat was the crop transformed first, using short-stemmed varieties bred in Mexico; the new rices from the International Rice Research Institute followed.
• Rainfall, however plentiful, is seasonal, variable and uncontrollable, so it cannot substitute for irrigation in a package that depends on watering to a schedule.
• Price support, assured procurement and public buffer stocks were the institutional half of the change, and M.S. Swaminathan is the name most associated with the Indian adaptation of the technology.
• The English and Hindi columns of option (b) differ: the English reads ‘Moderate rainfall’ while the Hindi prints a phrase meaning low or weak rainfall.

Common traps

• Treating the question as being about the quantity of water rather than about control over its timing.
• Assuming the wettest regions must have led the Green Revolution; several of them lagged.
• Bringing in population density, which describes the pressure on land rather than the conditions the technology needs.
• Forgetting that the package is a package: seed, fertiliser and water together, with water the element a farmer cannot supply at short notice.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Green Revolution in India was confined in its early years chiefly to which crop ?

  • (a)Rice
  • (b)Wheat
  • (c)Sugarcane
  • (d)Cotton

  Answer(b) Wheat — the short-stemmed high-yielding varieties bred in Mexico transformed wheat production in the north-west first, and the corresponding change in rice came later and more unevenly. Sugarcane and cotton were not the crops on which the package was built.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following best explains why the eastern rice belt lagged behind Punjab and Haryana in adopting high-yielding varieties ?

  • (a)It received too little rainfall for the new seeds
  • (b)It lacked assured irrigation and drainage, so water could not be controlled
  • (c)The new varieties could not be grown outside temperate climates
  • (d)Fertiliser was not available anywhere in eastern India

  Answer(b) It lacked assured irrigation and drainage, so water could not be controlled — abundant but uncontrolled monsoon water, with waterlogging in places, does not meet the package’s requirements. Option (a) reverses the region’s rainfall, option (c) misstates the varieties’ range, and option (d) is too sweeping to be true.