The Historical Context of India’s Farmer Protests
The history of the green revolution shows us that its incorrect to view minimum support prices as a subsidy to farmers.
Note: This is the first in a series of articles about the history and legacy of the Green Revolution in India.
To understand the demands of India’s protesting farmers, it’s important to delve a little bit into history. As the American novelist William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead, it is not even past.”
One of the most common complaints of the farmers goes something like this: “We saved the country from starvation and now we are being left to fend for ourselves.”
The history of how we got to where we are goes back to the Green Revolution — perhaps, the one policy that has had the most impact on India’s food security, its nutritional status, its agriculture, its politics, its foreign policy, its ecology, its health and more.
In the years after independence and partition, India did not produce enough food for its needs. The per capita availability of food grains had declined between 1893 and 1956, according to some estimates.
The shortage was particularly felt in its two main staples — rice and wheat. Many of the major wheat-growing areas in Punjab and rice-producing regions in East Bengal had gone to Pakistan.
India’s population increased by 40% between 1941 and 1961, which meant that the demand for food increased substantially. The young nation was heavily reliant on food imports, especially those of wheat from the US. So much so that most of the granaries were located close to the coast and not near farmlands.
The shortage of food grains was a major day-to-day problem for most Indians. India’s Prime Ministers found themselves advising people to ration their intake of food. In 1949, Jawaharlal Nehru suggested that everyone reduce the consumption of wheat and instead use a mixture of wheat and sweet potatoes to make rotis, a mixture, he said, he used himself. The idea was to cut down on expensive wheat imports.
In 1965, India’s next prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri urged everyone in the country to sacrifice at least one meal a week, as he was doing. By that time India’s already precarious food security situation had turned into an emergency on the back of two years of savage drought and two wars with China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1965.
India was in a situation often referred to as “ship to mouth”, implying that it could only feed itself if and when wheat shipments arrived from the US. Those imports came under its food aid program Public Law 480 (PL 480), or the “food for peace” programme as John F Kennedy described it.
However, the US did not view the program as unconditional. Instead, it had clear foreign policy objectives. The food could only be sent to “friendly countries.” The US would export food to developing countries only if they would publicly agree with its worldview and support its actions.
So, around the mid-1960s when India shifted its stance over the war in Vietnam, it ruffled a few feathers in Washington. In 1966, India’s then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi issued a statement deploring US bombings of North Vietnam and Hanoi. A few days later she also signed a statement jointly with the Soviet Union demanding an end to US bombings and describing US actions in Vietnam as “imperialist aggression.”
Lyndon Johnson, president of the US at the time, was furious and deliberately delayed food shipments to India leading to the “ship to mouth” situation. When it was pointed out to him that the Pope and others had also criticised US policy in Vietnam, Johnson said, “but they do not want our wheat.” Johnson’s use of the PL 480 program was later described by historian Kristin Ahlberg as Machiavellian but “with a heart.”
At the same time, India saw yet another drought season and production declined. Food grain production in India declined 20% below the average for the previous 5 years. Memories of the 1940s Bengal famine, in which an estimated 3 million people died, were still fresh.
The then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had been in office only a few months, was also struggling because of other issues like a violent agitation by the Hindu right demanding a ban on cow slaughter. This was also around the time when the socialist Ram Manohar Lohia famously described her as “goongi gudia” (mute doll).
But the biggest challenge India faced in 1965-66 was food security. The need to be food self-sufficient turned urgent in the face of famine-like conditions in Bihar and parts of Uttar Pradesh. The experience — or the humiliation as many have called it —with the US arm twisting in the PL 480 programme, led to the rapid realisation that food self-sufficiency is necessary for foreign policy sovereignty.
India was desperate to achieve food grain self-sufficiency. Indira Gandhi turned to MS Swaminathan, who was conferred the Bharat Ratna in February 2024 for his role in transforming Indian agriculture and ensuring the country’s food security.
By then Swaminathan had already spent a decade working on various methods to enhance yields. The groundwork for what would later be called the Green Revolution had been laid under Prime Minister Shastri and his Food Minister C Subramaniam in 1964-65.
In 1966 Gandhi asked Swaminathan how soon India could build a grain buffer stock of 10 million tonnes.
His response was clear and ambitious. We could do so, he said, as soon as the early 1970s but the government would have to ensure two things. First, build enough grain storage facilities in Punjab, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh. Two, — and this ties very closely with what the protesting farmers are demanding today — ensure that farmers receive an assured and remunerative price for the new crops India was asking them to grow to meet its food security needs. Assured, Swaminathan got to work to bring India’s green revolution to life.
It was a daunting task because it would require India to not only increase production by the amount that it was importing each year but also go on to produce an extra 10 million tonnes which could be stored in granaries for use during seasons of shortfall.
India imported high-yielding seeds of wheat which had been developed by Norman Borlaug, who would receive the Nobel prize in 1970 for his contributions to increasing food production around the world. They were combined with the use of chemical fertilizers and heavy irrigation. Technological know-how was transferred to farmers through institutions like the Punjab Agricultural University and television programs like Krishi Darshan.
Another crucial pillar — some have argued the most crucial — of the green revolution was assured and remunerative prices for farmers. This was done through the setting up of the Agricultural Prices Commission and thus was born the minimum support price regime. In 1965, the MSP for wheat was Rs 54 per quintal and paddy was at Rs 34-39 per quintal (thousand kilograms).
Punjab and Haryana (at the time the undivided state of Punjab) were chosen as ground zero for the green revolution. One of the reasons they were chosen was because of their relatively better-developed network of canals and dams. Another reason, as Swaminathan has written himself, was that farmers from Punjab were enterprising and more open to new ideas.
The results were spectacular. Between 1966 and 1972, India’s wheat output more than doubled from 11 to 23 million tonnes. Imports were cut from 10 to 2 million tonnes.
Soon, high-yielding varieties of rice developed by India’s own Gurdev Singh Khush were adopted too. Punjab and Haryana began to grow rice primarily for the rest of the country, as until then rice wasn’t a major part of the diets in these regions. The production of rice increased from 35 to 45 million tonnes between 1960 and 1970.
In just a few years, India was producing enough food grains to meet its needs. The key to the success was, of course, the technology of the new seeds, increased water use and the application of fertilisers. But, as Swaminathan pointed out, the farmers played perhaps the most important role in ensuring that the new technology worked as intended.
“Brimming with enthusiasm, hard-working, skilled and determined, the Punjab farmer has been the backbone of the revolution. Revolutions are usually associated with the young, but in this revolution, age has been no obstacle to participation. Farmers, young and old, educated, and uneducated, have easily taken to the new agronomy,” he wrote in his essay “The Punjab Miracle” for the Illustrated Weekly in 1969.
Swaminathan also realized early on that central to the success of the green revolution was getting the economics right. Rapid productivity increases were possible because the new technology was understood and adopted by farmers incentivised by the MSP mechanism that assured them of a remunerative price. In Africa, for example, the same technology was put to use but it did not have the desired results because farmers did not have that assurance.
The MSP regime was born as an incentive and assurance mechanism to ensure that farmers in Punjab and Haryana change their cropping patterns. While earlier they were growing substantial amounts of pulses and millets, India needed them to move to wheat and rice. That is what they did and ensured that India achieved food grain self-sufficiency, averted mass starvation and also kept its foreign policy independent.
It was perhaps one of the most critical public policy measures in India’s history and its primary focus was to ensure that India’s large population, an overwhelming majority of whom were desperately poor, had access to affordable food. MSP was thus — and it continues to be — mainly a subsidy for consumers and not for farmers as is sometimes erroneously believed. It was, instead, an incentive for farmers to do what the government wanted them to do.
The green revolution’s impact on India’s food security has been phenomenal. It has averted crises on many occasions including the recent pandemic where the government’s unplanned lockdown at short notice left most Indians to fend for themselves. It was the public distribution system (PDS), the system through which subsidised food (primarily wheat and rice) is distributed to more than 800 million people, that ensured that mass starvation was avoided. Food grains procured by the government — a very large proportion of which are procured from Haryana and Punjab— at MSP are distributed through the PDS.
However, the Green Revolution also had several adverse impacts. The heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides has contaminated groundwater, soil and even the food that it helps grow. It has led to adverse health impacts on people living in the Green Revolution regions.
It also incentivized the over-extraction of groundwater in Punjab and Haryana to grow wheat and rice. The regions are not natural habitats for rice because they are semi-arid and rice is an extremely water-intensive crop. Both Punjab and Haryana now face a severe groundwater crisis. Some studies have said that parts of the region may turn into deserts in the next two decades.
While the Green Revolution helped India achieve food self-sufficiency, it undermined its nutritional security. Wheat and rice largely replaced other coarse grains (for example, millets which offer better nutrition) that had been a part of Indian diets for centuries. The wheat and rice that was produced also became less nutritious and more toxic, as a recent study showed.
It is clear to everyone involved — the government, experts and farmers — that things have to change and that perhaps India needs another green revolution. The protesting farmers from Punjab and Haryana also recognise the need for them to break the paddy-wheat cycle and move to other crops. They argue that it's the MSP regime which can help them do that.
After the mid-1960s, the MSP regime slowly expanded to cover 23 crops for which a minimum assured price is declared today. But, apart from mainly rice and wheat in a few states, MSP doesn’t perform its basic function. Since there is no intervention by the government to ensure that market prices do not fall below MSP, the mere declaration of MSP doesn't serve as an assurance that farmers will be able to sell their crops at that price.
So, if a farmer in Punjab, for example, wants to move away from growing rice and plant bajra (pear millet), she cannot be sure that the price she will get for her crop will not be lower than MSP. But if she continues growing rice, that assurance exists and so there is no incentive for her to move away from the water-guzzling crop.
The fact that MSP only works for two crops means that farmers in Punjab and Haryana are stuck in the wheat-paddy cycle — a cycle which the government wanted them to get into during the Green Revolution. There are, of course, exceptions and the Haryana government has taken some steps towards breaking the cycle. But, for large-scale change to occur policy needs to change at the central level also because it will have consequences for India’s food security programme. That policy change, farmers argue, is that MSP is ensured for all crops.
As Swaminathan often argued, we must remember that agriculture is the largest private-sector enterprise in India. And for any business to be successful and sustainable, it needs to be profitable. But food also needs to be affordable for everyone which is why agriculture is subsidised across the world.
The green revolution showed us that given the right incentives, India’s farmers are capable of adapting remarkably quickly. In the 1960s, the newly independent nation needed them to grow large quantities of wheat and rice. They delivered. The need of this moment is to shift to more sustainable and nutritious crops. That shift can only happen if the right incentives are in place, as they were during the Green Revolution.