After admitting on February 25 in the Rajya Sabha, while speaking on the issue of price rise, that the present government has: neglected agriculture, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee revealed the next day in his budget speech a Rs.400 crore scheme for extending the Green Revolution to eastern India and another Rs. 300 crore for enhancing soil productivity in rain-fed areas where, among other things, 60,000 "pulses and oilseeds" villages would be organized.
The spontaneous welcome to this move by the Finance Minister by senior agricultural scientists at New Delhi-based Indian Agricultural Research Institute (the Pusa Institute) a few days after the presentation of the budget saying that it would be the beginning of agricultural revival in India reveals that this paltry sum of Rs.700 crores is actually worth Rs. 700 billion in the form of stimulus for agriculture.
For much too long a period, agriculture in India has thrived on the dynamics of the 1967-68 Green Revolution in wheat till this agriculture year 2009-10, when a 23 per cent shortfall in rain during the south-west monsoon of June-September 2009, exposed the weakness in agriculture and sent the Government scurrying for productivity stimulus through diverse means as higher and higher prices of essential items cut large holes in the pockets of the common man.
At an interaction with media persons on eve of the Pusa Krishi Vigyan Mela held in the Pusa campus on March 4 to 6, the Director Dr. H. S. Singh said that the budget proposals would result in the revival of agriculture in India He was particularly happy that the Government of India expressed resolve to extend the Green Revolution to Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa since these are "sleeping giants" of agricultural productivity.
His colleagues too felt equally enthusiastic and said in reply to questions that the goal of extending the Green Revolution to these States could be achieved within just three years. The Finance Minister too had told media persons after presentation of the budget that more funds would be provided if found necessary for implementing the goals set by him
It is necessary at this stage to recall what the Green Revolution was and how did it impact India's food security in the late 1960s when India was living a virtual "ship to mouth" existence. Food grains supply in the country during that period used to depend on the arrival of wheat-laden ships from the United States, bringing the PL 480 (public law 480 under which payment for the import could be made in local currencies.
India was already facing shortage of food grains since the days of the World War II and was dependent upon imports of wheat from the United States, Australia and Canada Also to be imported were other food grains such as millets - mainly from Argentina--which the Indians at large were not used to at that point of time. The Bengal famine of 1943 was still fresh in the minds of the people.
It was under these circumstances that India faced two consecutive failures of the south-west monsoon in 1965 and 1966. In 1965, we had to fight a war with Pakistan. The cumulative impact of all these developments was a severe shortage of food grains. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had taken over after Mr. Lal Bahadur Shastri's untimely death in January 1966.had to request the then U.S. President Lyndon Johnson for higher volume of supply of PL 480 wheat. The supply had gone up to more than 10 million tonnes in 1967, which had prevented another Bengal famine
While the 1965 war was on, Dr Norman Borlaug .the world's greatest hunger fighter who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in fighting hunger in India and elsewhere, was busy shipping 250 tons of newly developed seeds of semi-dwarf wheat plants to India from Mexico. Agriculture Minister C. Subramaniam had ordered the import in the face of opposition from skeptics who had expressed fear that this move would destroy "Indian agriculture" and replace it by "American agriculture".
The tests carried on these seeds mainly at the Pusa Institute - but also at the Punjab Agricultural University and the G. B. Pant Institute of Agricultural Technology-proved successful and Mr. Subramaniam ordered the import of 18,000 tonnes of these wheat seeds for seed multiplication in 1966-67. The new seeds available from early 1967 had created euphoria among farmers of north-west India who were prepared to buy these seeds at the unbelievable price of Rs. 1 per seed.
These seeds were planted in the winter of 1967 for harvesting in April-May 1968.Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had lent her moral support to this experiment by uprooting flowers from the front porch of her residence and planting the new wheat seeds in their place. By March 1968, the crop was so luxurious that the Government of India issued a postage stamp to honour the revolution in wheat cultivation even before the crop was harvested.
The first crop of the Green Revolution had raised the production of wheat from a mere 12.9 million tonnes (mt) in 1966-67 to 16.4 mt in 1967-68. The production was so bountiful that there was no place to store the gunny bags containing wheat, and schools had to be closed for storing the produce Dr. Borlaug has revealed that it was Dr. William S. Gaud, Director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) who had given the name Green Revolution to this phenomenon. India had stopped importing wheat from the United States on a regular basis by 1975.
This unprecedented development in Indian agriculture had not, unfortunately, covered States other than Punjab, Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh and northern Rajasthan, where irrigation was available and farmers were endowed with resources in order to afford fertilizers .The areas which missed the Green Revolution were and are still short of these resources and one is certain that when the farmers decide to launch the second Green Revolution in these areas, sufficient funds would be made available to them.
This is more or less apparent from Mr .Mukherjee's saying that "in the 60th year of the Republic, it is proposed to organize 60,000 pulses and oil seed villages in rain-fed areas during 2010 -11 and provide an integrated intervention for water harvesting, watershed management and soil health to enhance the productivity of the dry land farming areas". He has proposed to provide Rs.300 crores for this purpose.
The Finance Minister has also proposed to allocate another Rs. 200 crores for sustaining the gains already made during the Green Revolution period through conservation farming, which involves concurrent attention to soil health, water conservation and preservation of bio-diversity.;
According to Dr. H. S. Singh, Director of IARI, about 14 million hectares of land are available in these States where the Green Revolution gains are to be extended. This means that even if the new initiatives increase production by just one tone per hectare, of wheat or rice, the additional production would be 14 million tonnes of food grains.
This would raise the total food grains production in India by this volume from the highest production so far, 233.88 million tonnes in 2008-09. Even without the launch of this proposed stimulus, north-west India has been producing more and more of Basmati variety of rice with the result that of out of Rs.12,000 crore worth of export of the Basmati rice, these areas account for Rs.10,000 crores. Two varieties both developed by the IARI- the improved Pusa Basmati -1 variety and the Pusa-1121 variety which produces the longest cooked grain in the world account for most of the export.
It must be admitted that despite all these positive developments, the initiative for extending the Green Revolution to eastern India would not succeed unless sufficient water is available for the rice crop in particular. With a view to conserving ground water, the Government of India has imposed a ban on transplantation of paddy before June 22 every year so that natural precipitation prior to and during the monsoon rains are used for this operation. It is because of this, one surmises, that despite the drought this year, Punjab and Haryana sent more paddy to the central pool during the drought year than during normal rainfall years.
One must, at this stage, point out that under the Constitution, agriculture is a State subject. So is water, so, the success of Pranab Mukherjee's Rs.700 crore gamble - one might say - will depend largely on the performance of the State governments. Arabinda Ghose, NPA
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Sunday, August 01, 2010
