Crop Circle ; Transformed by the Green Revolution Into the Food Basket of the Country, Feeding the Nation Isn't Enough for Punjab As It Looks to Branch Out
Summary
Circa 1966. A year after the war with Pakistan, India was besieged on another front: daunting food insecurity, worsened by the failure of monsoons. With food grain imports, mainly from the US, spiralling to 10 million tonne, India was forced into a ship-to- mouth existence. Having survived a poor harvest and facing another, India imported 18,000 tonne of wheat seed from Mexico, which turned self-sufficient in wheat production by the late '50s by growing dwarf, high-yielding varieties of the grain.
When the first Mexican consignment of seeds reached Bombay, 2.5 lakh bags of 10 kg each were transported by road to Punjab and distributed before the rabi season of 1967. Two Spanish varieties, Lermarojo and Sanavra-64, were sown across the state. In April 1968, farmers reaped a bumper crop of wheat--market arrivals leapfrogged from three lakh tonne to 16 lakh tonne. The market glut saw schools being shut down so that their buildings could be used to store the produce before distribution to food grain deficit states. The green revolution marked the deliverance from food imports and Punjab's socio-economic transformation, from an impoverished state to the nation's food basket. By 1969, the revolution had extended to rice, with the import of IR-8, seeds imported from the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) that raised the paddy yield from one tonne per hectare to four tonne.See the full content of this document
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Crop Circle ; Transformed by the Green Revolution Into the Food Basket of the Country, Feeding the Nation Isn't Enough for Punjab As It Looks to Branch Out
Punjab became a state where the green revolution saw massive economic growth. Agriculture still accounts for one-third of the state GDP and the state leads the wor...
See the full content of this document