Green Revolution Revisited: The Contemporary Agrarian Situation in Punjab, India

Abstract

The Green Revolution was India’s first industrial agricultural revolution that replaced the traditional farming system completely. But the adverse consequences of Green Revolution in the form of stagnation in production aggravated the problems of the farmers in the era of post-Green Revolution in 1980s and 1990s. The late 1990s witnessed an emergency of debt-driven suicides and rapid indebtedness that had taken hold of the countryside across the nation. Being the epicentre, the Green Revolution in Punjab did not sustain for a long time, as it started losing its charm and was followed by a series of ‘crises’, especially in its economy and environment. The farmers in Punjab are facing a severe problem with stagnation in production due to vast cereal-based mono cropping (mainly wheat-rice cycle) instead of multiple cropping, abandoning other crops like pulses, mustard, vegetables, and so on. Besides the practice of monoculture, the application of expensive chemicals (like fertilisers, pesticides, weedicides, and so on), over-mechanisation, labour and irrigation eventually increased the input cost of cultivation manifolds. Due to this high input costs of cultivation, farmers resorted to various formal (like banks, cooperatives, and so on) and informal (like local moneylenders or arhtiyas, who are commission agents in the grain markets) credit institutions for borrowing money. But due to repeated stagnation, the net output and subsequent profit margin reduced drastically. As a result, farmers could not repay the loan and eventually got entrapped into the vicious cycle of debt. On the other hand, after the liberalised economic policy of the government, the farmers received marginal importance and they could not cope up with the free and open market system. As a result, the incidence of indebtedness increased at an alarming rate. To get rid of indebtedness, many farmers across the state committed suicide. On the basis of empirical data, the present article will show the real picture of the contemporary agrarian situation in India’s most-developed state, Punjab.