A History of India's Green Revolution

Examining India's embrace of productive agriculture in the 1960s, Prakash Kumar reveals modernization to be a deeply contested process.

India's 'green revolution' embraced more productive agricultural practices and high yielding variety seeds, bringing the country out of food scarcity. Although lauded as a success of the Cold War fight against hunger, Prakash Kumar argues this was part of a much broader, contested history of agrarian modernization in India.In the mid-1960s, India's 'green revolution' saw the embrace of more productive agricultural practices and high yielding variety seeds, bringing the country out of food scarcity. Although lauded as a success of the Cold War fight against hunger, the green revolution has also faced criticisms for causing ecological degradation and socio-economic inequality. This book contextualizes the 'green revolution' to show the contingencies and pitfalls of agrarian transformation. Prakash Kumar unpacks its contested history, tracing agricultural modernization in India from colonial-era crop development, to land and tenure reforms, community development, and the expansion of arable lands. He also examines the involvement of the colonial state, post-colonial elites, and American modernizers. Over time, all of these efforts came under the spell of technocracy, an unyielding belief in the power of technology to solve social and economic underdevelopment which, Kumar argues, best explains what caused the green revolution.