The Green Revolution in Punjab: How a Hungry India Was Fed, and What It Cost the Land of Five Rivers

In 1966 the grain that fed India’s cities did not come from its fields. It came from Kansas and Nebraska, in the holds of American ships. About three of them a day tied up at Indian ports that year, and the wheat went from the docks to the ration shops so fast that officials had a phrase for it: ship to mouth.

The monsoon had failed in 1965, and it failed again in 1966. The Hindu wrote of 30 million people in dire distress. In Delhi, the Food and Agriculture Minister, C. Subramaniam, a lawyer from Tamil Nadu, did something odd for a minister. He had wheat sown on the lawn of his own bungalow, so that doubting MPs could walk past and see the new seed growing.

The fear was not abstract. Older Indians remembered the Bengal famine of 1943, when millions died under British rule. Within two years, Western writers would be predicting mass famine in India.

The grain came under PL-480, an American law of 1954 that let poor countries buy US surplus wheat on easy terms. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson put India on what became known as the short tether: shipments were released a month at a time, tied to India spending more on fertiliser and farming. Some historians add that Johnson was also angry at India’s criticism of the American bombing of North Vietnam.

Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Prime Minister, had already told the country in 1965 to hail both soldier and farmer: Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. He asked Indians to skip a meal a week. He died at Tashkent in January 1966, and his successor, Indira Gandhi, felt the humiliation of the tether personally.

I don’t ever want us to have to beg for food again.Indira Gandhi, as quoted in ThePrint’s history of the crisis

Within five years India would be close to feeding itself, and one small state would do more of the work than any other. This is how it happened, and what it cost.

March 1963. A lanky man from Iowa in a work shirt walked the wheat fields of north India with a young Indian scientist at his side. Norman Borlaug had spent nearly two decades in Mexico breeding wheat that stood short and stiff. Ordinary tall wheat, fed with fertiliser, grew heavy heads and fell over in the wind. Borlaug’s dwarfs held up their grain.

The young scientist was M. S. Swaminathan of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. He had been pressing for Borlaug’s visit since 1960, and the formal invitation went out at the end of 1962. In October 1963 about 100 kilos of seed of four Mexican dwarf wheats arrived. That November they were sown in trial plots in Delhi, Ludhiana, Pantnagar, Kanpur and Pusa in Bihar.

Swaminathan later recalled a lot of sceptics. The plots answered them. Two Mexican varieties, Lerma Rojo 64 and Sonora 64, did so well in the 1963–64 and 1964–65 trials that they were cleared for release in 1965.

Getting seed in bulk was its own drama. In Borlaug’s telling, as reported in his Dawn obituary, Mexican customs held up the first big consignment, so he trucked it to Los Angeles, and the ship was at sea when India and Pakistan went to war in September 1965. The seed arrived anyway. The government’s own count was about 250 tonnes in 1965, and then, in 1966, an order that astonished the seed trade: 18,000 tonnes.

It was a political gamble as much as a scientific one. Subramaniam signed a deal with the US Agriculture Secretary, Orville Freeman, in Rome on 25 November 1965 that tied American aid to a big push on fertiliser and seed. In the 1967 election Subramaniam lost his seat.

On 8 July 1963, Jawaharlal Nehru came to Ludhiana to open a new university. Punjab Agricultural University had been set up in 1962 on the model of the American land-grant colleges, with teaching, research and work in the villages under one roof. Within five years its fields would matter more to India’s dinner plates than almost anywhere else.

Punjab had what the new seeds needed. The Bhakra dam and its canals had brought water. The land had been consolidated into bigger, regular holdings in the 1950s. Its farmers, many of them Jat Sikh families who had rebuilt their lives after Partition, had a reputation for trying anything that might pay. And from the mid-1960s, more and more of them sank tubewells of their own.

At PAU, the plant breeder Dilbagh Singh Athwal and his team crossed the Mexican Lerma Rojo with an Indian line. Punjab’s eaters did not like the red Mexican grain. The result, released in 1967, had amber grain that made good chapatis. It was called Kalyan Sona, and it spread across the state.

Farmers came to the university for seed and advice, and its extension workers went village to village. The new package was simple to describe and expensive to follow: dwarf seed, chemical fertiliser, regular water, pesticide when pests came. It needed cash, credit and a buyer for the grain. The state would soon provide the last two.

Spring 1968. In Punjab the wheat came in so thick that, as Borlaug later told it, there were not enough hands to cut it. The new problem was not hunger but storage.

The national figures tell the story in a line. India grew about 11.4 million tonnes of wheat in 1966–67. The 1968 harvest was put at about 16.5 million tonnes, and by 1971–72 the country harvested 26.4 million. In Punjab, wheat output went from 1.77 million tonnes in 1960–61 to 5.14 million in 1970–71.

In March 1968 a US aid official, William Gaud, gave the change a name: the Green Revolution. In July 1968 Indira Gandhi released a postage stamp to mark the Wheat Revolution. The Hindustan Times answered with a cartoon of a stamp of its own: a rat eating the government’s grain pile. Even in triumph, Indians knew storage was a problem.

In January 1968, at the Indian Science Congress in Varanasi, Swaminathan himself gave a warning that reads today like a prophecy. Farming for quick profit without care for the soil, he said, would one day raise deserts, and careless tapping of underground water would use up a resource left by ages of nature.

Exploitive agriculture offers great dangers.M. S. Swaminathan, Indian Science Congress, Varanasi, January 1968

In December 1970 Borlaug collected the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. In his lecture he rewrote an old saying: if you want peace, work for justice, but also cultivate the fields to produce more bread.

Seeds alone do not make a revolution. A farmer who borrows for fertiliser needs to know what his crop will fetch. In January 1965, Subramaniam’s ministry set up two bodies that still shape Punjab: the Agricultural Prices Commission, to recommend prices, and the Food Corporation of India, to buy, store and move grain.

In 1966–67 the government announced its first minimum support price, for wheat, at Rs 54 a quintal. If the market paid less, the state would buy. In Punjab, with its dense network of mandis and arhtiyas, the commission agents who finance and sell for farmers, that promise was kept more fully than almost anywhere else. In recent seasons the wheat MSP has been above Rs 2,400 a quintal.

Rice followed wheat. In 1966–67 paddy grew on about 2.85 lakh hectares of Punjab. Punjabis did not traditionally eat much rice, but the new varieties yielded heavily, the government bought them at MSP, and from 1997 the state gave farmers free electricity for their pumps. Today paddy covers about 32 lakh hectares, most of it watered from tubewells in the hottest months of the year.

The result is a state that is about 1.5 per cent of India’s land and has for decades been the largest single supplier of the central grain pool. In the 2024–25 season, agencies bought about 173 lakh tonnes of paddy in Punjab, and Punjab was again India’s biggest wheat procurer, at about 124 lakh tonnes.

It also made Punjab’s farmers among the better-off in India. In the government’s 2019 survey of farm households, Punjab’s averaged Rs 26,701 a month, second only to Meghalaya and more than two and a half times the national average of Rs 10,218. Villages got brick houses, tractors, motorbikes and sons and daughters in college, and in time in Canada.

Go to a village in Sangrur or Barnala in June and listen. Under the heat comes a steady hum: submersible pumps, set deeper every few years, drawing water for paddy. A generation ago many farmers here used centrifugal pumps near the surface. Many now borrow lakhs to bore far deeper.

The Central Ground Water Board’s 2025 assessment put Punjab’s stage of groundwater extraction at 156.36 per cent: it pulls out about one and a half times what rain and canals put back each year. That is the highest of any state; India as a whole stands at about 61 per cent. Reports on the assessment put about 72.5 per cent of Punjab’s 153 assessment units, roughly 111 blocks, in the over-exploited class.

How fast is it going? A CGWB study of trends up to 2017 led to the most quoted warning: that at that pace, the water table would sink below 300 metres by 2039. Punjab scientists have since read it as a warning that the state’s three aquifers could be exhausted by then. In central and southern districts, studies have measured an average fall of about half a metre a year.

The picture is not all one way. The CGWB’s recent bulletin found water levels fell in about 81 per cent of Punjab’s area between 2015 and 2024. Yet a government reply in Parliament said 57 per cent of monitored wells showed a rise over a decade. Both can be true: canal-fed and waterlogged south-western pockets differ sharply from the tubewell heartland.

Quality is a second worry. The CGWB’s 2025 water quality report found that 62.5 per cent of the Punjab samples it tested for uranium were above the safe limit, The Tribune reported. Why uranium appears in Malwa’s water is still being studied.

Punjab has tried to slow the drain. The Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, 2009, banned sowing paddy nurseries before 10 May and transplanting before 10 June, so that paddy would use more monsoon rain and less groundwater. The date was later pushed to 15 and then 20 June, and has since been moved earlier again. In 1986 a committee led by the economist S. S. Johl had already urged Punjab to move a fifth of its wheat-paddy land to other crops. Forty years later, paddy covers more land than ever.

October, south-east Punjab. The paddy has been cut by combine harvesters that leave knee-high stalks and loose straw. The wheat must be sown within weeks. A farmer drags a burning bundle along the rows, and by evening the horizon is orange and the sky over Delhi turns grey.

Farm fires counted by satellite in Punjab show how big the habit was, and how fast it has shrunk. By figures from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, reported by the Hindustan Times, Punjab had 83,002 fires in the 2020 season, 71,304 in 2021, 49,922 in 2022, 36,663 in 2023, 10,909 in 2024 and 5,114 in 2025. By 24 October this year, official data reported by Outlook showed 574 fires, a little above the same point of 2025.

Farmers have their reasons. The window between paddy harvest and wheat sowing is short, and agricultural scientists note that the 2009 water law, by pushing paddy later, squeezed it further. Machines to handle straw cost money, and many small farmers say the help on offer does not cover the diesel and the delay.

Machines do exist. The Happy Seeder, tested in Punjab from the 2000s, drills wheat seed straight through the stubble, leaving the straw as mulch. Fines, subsidies, satellite policing and pressure from the courts and the Commission for Air Quality Management have all played a part in the fall.

For years a passenger train ran from Bathinda to Bikaner in Rajasthan, where a cancer hospital offered cheap treatment. Reporters counted 60 to 70 patients a day on board, and the train got a grim nickname: the cancer train. It became the symbol of a fear that the Green Revolution was poisoning the people who made it.

The fear has some evidence behind it. Malwa, the region south of the Sutlej, is also Punjab’s cotton belt, where pests and heavy spraying went together. A study by PGIMER Chandigarh and the Punjab Pollution Control Board in the 2000s compared Talwandi Sabo in Bathinda with Chamkaur Sahib in Ropar. It found heptachlor above safe limits in Talwandi Sabo’s tap and groundwater, and pesticides such as aldrin and endosulfan in the blood of cancer patients. It said pesticides could be one of the main reasons for the higher cancer rate, alongside other factors.

A door-to-door state survey reported in 2013 put Malwa at about 107 cancer cases per lakh people, against 88 in Doaba and 64 in Majha. The state’s own health minister said there was still no concrete evidence explaining the difference.

Then came the registry. From 1 January 2013, Tata Memorial Centre and PGIMER began recording every diagnosed cancer in parts of Punjab. In 2017 Tata Memorial’s director, Dr Anil D’Cruz, called the ‘cancer belt’ label wrong, and said Punjab’s rate was about the national average. The registry report for Sangrur and Mansa pointed to heavy drinking, not uranium or pesticides, as a leading cause, with cancer of the food pipe common among men.

What is proven, and what is not. Proven: Punjab’s farms use heavy amounts of fertiliser and pesticide, and pesticide residues have been found in Malwa’s water and in patients’ blood. Not proven: that pesticides are the main cause of cancer in Malwa, or that the region’s cancer rate is far above the rest of India. The registry, the best tool so far, points more to alcohol, tobacco and lifestyle. Uranium in the water is under study.

A small farmer in Mansa with four acres borrows from the arhtiya for seed, diesel and a daughter’s wedding. The cotton fails to a pest, or the price falls, and the interest keeps running. This is the story researchers heard again and again when they went from house to house.

This part discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please talk to someone. Tele-MANAS, India’s free government mental health helpline, answers 24 hours a day on 14416 or 1-800-891-4416.

Three universities, PAU, Punjabi University and Guru Nanak Dev University, counted 16,606 suicides of farmers and farm labourers in Punjab between 2000 and 2015, The Tribune reported. About 87 per cent were linked to debt, and 76 per cent of the farmers owned less than five acres. In the six Malwa districts PAU surveyed, landless farm labourers made up about 44 per cent of the dead, a reminder that the Green Revolution’s losers were not only landowners.

Researchers who did that fieldwork argue that official crime records count far fewer farm suicides than they found. Government figures and the universities’ figures have never been fully reconciled.

Debt and prosperity sit side by side. The same 2019 national survey that ranked Punjab’s farm households second in income found they owed an average of Rs 2,03,249, third-highest in India and nearly three times the national average of Rs 74,121. Rising costs, smaller holdings after each generation, flat yields and the pull of a bigger house or a ticket abroad all push borrowing up.

In September 2020 Parliament passed three farm laws. The government said they would free farmers to sell outside the regulated mandis and bring private money into farming. In Punjab, where the whole Green Revolution bargain rests on the mandi and MSP, farmers heard something else: that assured government buying would wither.

From 26 November 2020, tens of thousands of them, led by Punjab’s unions, camped at Delhi’s borders for more than a year. The government announced repeal in November 2021. The farmers’ biggest remaining demand, a law guaranteeing MSP, has still not been met. We tell that year in full in our long read on the farmers’ protest of 2020–21.

Seen from Punjab, the protest was the Green Revolution’s bill coming due: a system built in 1966 to save India from hunger had left Punjab locked into two crops, with falling water, rising debt and nothing else that pays as surely.

Tell all of it. In 1966 India was a proud new nation living on another country’s surplus, and the people who changed that, from a farm boy from Iowa to a geneticist from Kumbakonam to a minister who lost his seat for it, deserve the credit history gives them. So do the farmers of Punjab, who bet their land on seeds no one had grown before.

But a granary is not a free gift. Punjab gave India its water, its soil and its winter air, and many of its smallest farmers and labourers paid with their lives. The record is plain on the water and the debt. It is not plain on cancer, and anyone who claims it is, either way, is ahead of the evidence.

The question now is the one Swaminathan asked in 1968: how to keep feeding India without using up Punjab. Readers will answer it differently. They should at least answer it knowing the whole story.