India After Independence: 1947-2000 (68 page)

In the early stages of the Green Revolution, particularly the early seventies, a considerable opinion emerged that the Green Revolution was leading to class polarization in the countryside. It was argued that the class of rich peasants and capitalist farmers were getting strengthened partly at the expense of the small peasants, tenants, etc., who, unable to access the modem inputs, were being pushed into the rank of the landless, i.e., a process of de-peasantisation was in progress. Further, the mechanization of agriculture was displacing labour, leading to increasing unemployment and a fall in wages of agricultural labour. In other words, on the whole, a process of relative immiserisation of the rural poor and for some sections even absolute immiserisation was taking place, creating conditions for agrarian unrest and revolt. ‘The Green Revolution will lead to the Red Revolution’ was the catchy slogan doing the rounds in some circles in the late sixties and early seventies.

Later events and recent scholarship has shown most of these misgivings were unfounded, as were the reservations about regional inequality. From the very beginning of the initiation of the New Agricultural Strategy there was an awareness that steps would have to be taken to ensure that the poor farmers could access the benefits of the new technology and the agricultural labourers’ interests were protected. (It may be noted that the immediate, though somewhat alarmist, warning signals put out by sections of the Indian intelligentsia regarding the negative effects of the new strategy on the poor perhaps contributed to the early consciousness and efforts to prevent such a denouement.) Shortly after the strategy was fully on course a concerted effort was made once again, as part of the
garibi hatao
campaign launched by Indira Gandhi in the late sixties and seventies, to reach the rural poor, small farmers and the landless. A series of programmes such as the Rural Works Programme (RWP), Small Farmers Development Agency (SFDA), Marginal Farmers and Agricultural Labourers Scheme (MFAL), Crash Scheme for Rural Employment (CSRE), The Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) in Maharashtra, were launched. The SFDA and the MFAL, for example, identified more than a million small farmers and over half a million marginal fanners who were given short, medium and long-term loans. Small and marginal farmers were also assisted by government subsidies of 25 per cent and 33.3 per cent of the investments for which they borrowed, respectively. Millions of poor farmers also benefited from the massive increase in institutional credit made available to agriculture, through cooperative societies, land development banks, nationalized commercial banks, Agricultural Refinance Corporation, etc., with a special effort, which was considerably successful, to see that the credit reached the poorer sections as well. (See
chapter 30
.)

With all their weaknesses and loopholes these programmes had a considerable cumulative effect. So much so that eminent economist Raj Krishna reported in 1979 that ‘small farmers, as a class, command more productive assets and inputs per unit of land than large farmers.’
⁴
Though
the small farmers, with operational holdings of five acres or less, cultivated only 21 per cent of the total cultivated area, their share of net irrigated area was 31.4 per cent, of total fertiliser use was 32 per cent and of total agricultural credit 33 per cent. The new Green Revolution technology proved to be not only scale-neutral but appears to have evolved an inverse relationship between scale and productivity. Small farmers applying more inputs per unit of land compared to large farmers were able to produce 26 per cent of the value of agricultural output with 21 per cent of the land.

The Green Revolution, far from pushing the small farmer into the ranks of the landless, actually enabled him to survive. With the adoption of the new technology, improved seeds and other agricultural inputs, the small farmer became relatively more viable and did not have to sell out to the large farmer in distress. Studies such as those of G.S.’ Bhalla and G.K. Chadha
⁵
have confirmed this phenomenon. In fact, the share of the large landowners operating 25 acres or more in the total number of holdings and in the total area cultivated has consistently declined over the years since independence. And the number of holdings and the area, controlled by the marginal, small and medium landowners has remained stable or risen over the years. The Green Revolution notwithstanding, India has remained a country dominated by small and medium farmers. In 1980-81, cultivators operating holdings of 25 acres or less constituted nearly 98 per cent of the total operational holdings, cultivating 77.2 per cent of the total area, and cultivators operating holdings of 10 acres or less constituted 88.5 per cent of the total operational holdings, cultivating 47.5 per cent of the total area.

Tenants and sharecroppers, who did not have security of tenure, were perhaps the only losers. These sections came under pressure as rents and land values rose rapidly in areas where the Green Revolution spread. Also, in these areas the owners would tend to get rid of the unprotected tenants in order to resume self-cultivation with hired labour and modem equipment. ‘Secure’ tenants and sharecroppers were however, like land-owning small peasants, beneficiaries of the new technology.

Fears of the Green Revolution leading to increasing rural unemployment because of labour-displacing mechanization proved to be baseless. On the basis of a field trip made as early as February 1969 in Punjab, Wolf Ladejinsky (who advised General MacArthur in planning land reforms in Japan during the period of allied occupation after the War and after that was closely associated with land reforms in Taiwan, South Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, Philippines and India) reported that with the spread of the new technology ‘the demand for casual labour has increased and so have wages and the landless laborer is somewhat better off than in the past.’
⁶
The ‘victims’ of tractorization were bullocks not labour. The net impact of tractorization, taking into account increase in cropping intensity etc., was an increased demand for labour. The fear that that indiscriminate mechanization in the next, post-tractorization phase, such as large-scale introduction of combine harvesters and threshers would lead to displacement of labour also does not appear to have materialized on a significant scale
in any part of the country till today. In Punjab, for example, the number of agricultural labourers is said to have trebled between 1961 and 1981, while the number of landless agricultural households declined. The additional demand for labour was met through large-scale migration of labour from the poorer districts of eastern U.P. and Bihar.

It has been argued, however, that in the later phases of the Green Revolution the
rate
of increase in employment in agriculture, which accompanied agricultural growth, has tended to slacken, i.e., the employment elasticity of output growth was declining. The complaint, however, was about the failure to generate sufficient additional employment. There was no question of any displacement of labour.

Besides, the general experience of the Green Revolution in region after region—Punjab, Haryana, coastal Andhra, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, etc.,—has been that apart from the growth in agricultural employment, it has generated non-agricultural rural and semi-urban employment, through the development of agro-industries, rapid increase in trade and warehousing of agricultural produce and agricultural inputs like fertilizers and pesticides, massive growth of the transport industry, manufacturing of a large range of farm implements and other inputs, heavy demand for repairs and servicing of trucks, tractors, electric and diesel pumps and other modem agricultural equipment and machinery and so on. Since over time almost all the agricultural machinery and equipment was produced indigenously, mechanization in agriculture created urban factory employment. Also, the increase in rural incomes following the Green Revolution led to increased demand for masons, carpenters, tailors, weavers, etc., in the rural areas and for factory-produced consumer durables from transistor radios, watches, cycles, fans, televisions, washing-machines, motorcycles, sewing machines to cars and air conditioners. Since the rural demand for some of these commodities began to exceed the urban demand, forcing their manufacturers to turn towards the countryside, its impact on generating urban employment is not inconsequential. It is significant that Punjab saw a striking increase of about 50 per cent in urban employment between 1971 and 1981, partly reflecting the impact of development in agriculture in the non-agricultural sector.

However, all the employment generated by the Green Revolution was still not sufficient to meet the employment requirements of the rapidly growing population, a large proportion of which lived in the countryside. Urgent short-term and long-term steps were therefore necessary to deal with this situation. Here, too, the Green Revolution proved critical. The surplus stocks of foodgrain that became available as a result of the agricultural breakthrough made it possible to launch employment-generating poverty-alleviation programmes on a considerable scale, particularly in the agriculturally backward areas. As the agriculture expert and policy-maker C.H. Hanumantha Rao put it:
⁷

From about 20 million person-days of employment generated in the mid-Sixties, the employment generated under such programmes
in the country as a whole amounted to 850 million person-days in 1988-89. These employment programmes, together with the income generated under the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), seem to make up for about half the deficiency in employment generation in agriculture in the post-green revolution period . . . These programmes were made possible because of the increased availability of foodgrains from internal procurement.

The Green Revolution did however contribute to increase in inequality in the countryside. But the poor too benefited in absolute terms though their well-to-do neighbours did relatively far better. Yet, pursuing a strategy which was more ‘equitable’ and ‘politically correct’ but left the rural poor, already living at the edges of survival, worse off would be cruel. Some of the earliest reports of the impact of the New Agricultural Strategy, such as those of Daniel Thorner based on field visits to coastal Andhra, Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, parts of Haryana, western U.P., etc., in 1966 and 1967-8 and those of Ladejinsky from Punjab in 1969 confirm that, while inequity increased, the poor including the small peasant and the landless agricultural labourer benefitted. Real wages of agricultural labour consistently rose in areas where the Green Revolution spread. Increase in wages in the high growth areas, such as Punjab, would have been much sharper but for the migration of labour from low-wage areas of Bihar and U.P. But then not only were the migrant labourers, beneficiaries of considerably higher wages, the wage levels in the areas they came from also tended to rise. Inter-state disparities in agricultural wages began to decline since the mid-seventies, partly because of the migration of labour from the backward regions to the Green Revolution areas.

In summary, then the Green Revolution had a major impact on rural poverty levels through its impact on food availability, decline in relative prices of food (the most important item of expenditure for the poor), generating of agricultural and non-agricultural employment, rise in wages and so on. The link between the spread of agricultural growth or the Green Revolution in an area and the fall in the numbers of the rural population living below the poverty line in that area is now widely accepted and can be seen to be operating in a large and growing part of the country. With the overwhelming proportion of the Indian population still dependent on agriculture (over two-thirds even today) the critical importance of spreading the Green Revolution type of development as an anti-poverty measure has been widely recognized. (The slowing down in recent years of public investment in irrigation and other infrastructure, which is critical for the spread of rapid agricultural growth, has been widely criticized for this reason.)

The Green Revolution, therefore, has not spawned any ‘Red Revolution’ in the countryside. Peasant protest and even peasant militancy has been on the rise but then these are not movements of the lowest strata demanding a systemic overthrow but of small, medium and large peasants who are beneficiaries of the system and want more via higher prices for their
produce and lower input costs through state subsidy. (See
chapter 32
.) In fact, over the years the political clout of these sections has increased and the governments of the day have felt compelled, to a greater or lesser degree, to make concessions to them, which were often not economically viable. Most states, for example, provide electrical power for agricultural purposes at prices far below the cost of production, with some states like Punjab providing it free! Such developments have in the long run adversely affected the overall health of the Indian economy including that of agriculture. (See
chapter 24
,
29
and
32
.)

A major and pressing issue that has surfaced in recent years relates to the question of environmental degradation and the long-term sustainability of agricultural growth. The negative environmental impact of excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as the plateauing off of the growth rates in areas using such technology over a long period, such as Punjab, has been well-documented. The excessive withdrawal of groundwater for irrigation, which is taking place in many Green Revolution areas without adequate recharging of the sub-soil aquafers, is also environmentally unsustainable. However, there are no easy answers to this problem. While agricultural growth with this technology is throwing up problems, absence of agricultural growth throws up other critical environmental problems apart from the obvious economic and political ones. It has been argued that in India the ecological degradation occurs
mainly
due to the extension of cultivation to the marginal and sub-marginal dryland and to deforestation and it has also been noted that ‘across different states in India, the extension of areas under cultivation and the denudation of forests seems to be high
where the progress of yield-increasing technology is slow
,’
⁹
and the poor are forced to depend on marginal lands, village commons and forests, etc. The renowned agricultural expert, M.S. Swaminathan,’
¹⁰
has estimated that to produce the current level of foodgrains output with the pre-Green Revolution yields per hectare of wheat and rice would require an additional 80 million hectares of land, i.e., it would require an impossible increase of about 66 per cent in the existing cultivable area! Clearly, yield-increasing technology has been critical for forest-saving in a situation where India’s forest cover has depleted to dangerous levels.