Heavy Lies the Grain

Sixty years on, Punjab’s agricultural landscape reveals the human and environmental toll of India’s Green Revolution.

During the 1960s, India launched an ambitious programme called the Green Revolution to increase foodgrain yields and avert a looming hunger crisis. The country had just endured two severe droughts in 1965 and 1966, and foodgrain production had fallen to historic lows. In 1965, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri urged Indians to skip a meal a week to ease dependence on food imports. By 1966, India was importing a record 10 million tonnes of wheat, earning the description of a “ship-to-mouth” economy.

In Punjab, a small state that borders Pakistan in the country’s northwest, farmers traditionally cultivated maize, pulses, and oilseeds. Its fertile soils, abundant water resources, and entrepreneurial farming communities made it an ideal testing ground for the Green Revolution. Farmers were encouraged to adopt a wheat-rice cropping cycle and offered high-yielding seed varieties, easier access to fertilisers and pesticides, and support to mechanise farm equipment.

As a result, between 1960 and 2023, wheat acreage in Punjab more than doubled, and production increased more than ninefold. Rice acreage expanded nearly fourteen times during the same period, while production rose roughly 58 times. Today, Punjab, which represents less than two percent of India’s geographical area, now produces about sixteen percent of the country’s wheat and eleven percent of its rice.

Rice is a water-intensive crop that requires about 5000 litres per kilogram of grain produced, and the impact of years of rice cultivation on Punjab’s groundwater levels has been drastic. The situation is compounded by climate change, as erratic rainfall and extreme weather events affect surface water availability. Consequently, farmers are digging tubewells in record numbers and to greater depths. The number of tube wells in the state has increased exponentially, from a mere 7,445 in 1961 to 1.5 million in 2021. A report by the Central Ground Water Board in 2019 warned that groundwater levels across Punjab were falling at the rate of 49 centimetres per year and that Punjab could exhaust its groundwater by 2039.

Decades of intense monocropping have led to a decline in soil fertility, and farmers say they use more fertilisers and pesticides each year, yet struggle to maintain the same yields. Unsurprisingly, Punjab is the largest consumer of fertilisers in the country. There is a growing consensus among farmers that this indiscriminate usage is responsible for the scourge of cancers and chronic kidney disorders.

Data from the Indian Council of Medical Research showed that the incidence of cancer cases in Punjab rose by 7% between 2023 and 2024. A train that many from the region travel by to a hospital in neighbouring Rajasthan is infamously called the Cancer Express. The number of passengers has now reduced after three public hospitals were established in southern Punjab to deal with cancers, but many still continue to take the train.

Farmers are well aware of these pressures and want to diversify into less water-hungry crops. Yet the safety net of a Minimum Support Price, or an assured price from the government, for rice remains a powerful incentive to continue paddy cultivation. Farmers from Punjab laid siege to Delhi’s borders for over a year in 2020–21 and have returned to protest again at Punjab’s borders between 2023 and 2024, demanding legal guarantees for MSP and an expansion of its coverage to all crops. Many hope that assured prices for alternative crops could protect both the state’s dwindling groundwater and their own livelihoods.

Kanak means gold in Sanskrit. In Punjabi, a language that evolved from Sanskrit, it has come to mean wheat.

Wheat lit up by the lights of a harvester in Sema in Bathinda, Punjab, India. April 27, 2024.

Sukhvinder Singh Sidhu, 28, walks through his field to ensure even watering of his wheat crop at night when it is his turn to draw water from the canal in Gehri Devi Nagar in Bathinda, Punjab, India. January 23, 2024.  Each farmer gets to draw water for 20 minutes per every acre of land they cultivate, the duration is usually decided by a village official at a public meeting in the summer months.

During the early years of the Green Revolution, farmers primarily relied on canals for irrigation. With the introduction of tubewells, farmers no longer had to wait for their turn to draw water from the canal, which could sometimes be at inconvenient hours. The introduction of free power for farms in 1997 contributed to the wider adaptation of tubewells and the rapid depletion of groundwater resources.

Labh Singh, 65, is a small farmer who owns 2.15 acres of land in Khiala Kalan in Mansa, Punjab, India. November 22, 2017. During the Green Revolution, farmers in Punjab were encouraged to move away from the traditional pulses, maize and vegetables and to grow wheat and rice paddy instead.

A worker harvests cotton in a farm in Thutianwali in Mansa, Punjab, India. January 18, 2017.

A house surrounded by the flooding waters of the Ghaggar at Phus Mandi in Mansa, Punjab, India. July 24, 2023. The Ghaggar, a seasonal river, was in spate after receiving heavy inflows from the upper reaches of the Himalayas, which scientists attribute to climate change.

Gurnishan Singh, 45, poses at his home that was destroyed by the flooding waters of the Beas in Bhaini Kadar in Kapurthala, Punjab, India. His four acre land is still under water, more than two months after the flood, and he is still waiting for compensation. October 08, 2023.

Village elders spend an evening at a platform that serves as a communal space in Kotra Kalan in Mansa, Punjab. November 21, 2017.

Buta Singh, a 55-year-old farmworker, washes his hands after after spraying a cocktail of fungicide, insecticide and nutrient supplements in a desperate attempt to achieve a better paddy yield in Nangal Kalan in Mansa, Punjab, India. September 29, 2023.

Decades of intense monocropping have led to a decline in soil fertility, and farmers say they use more fertilisers and pesticides each year, yet struggle to maintain the same yields.

Nanku, 14, assists his father, Gurbakshan Singh, in keeping stray cattle away from the fields in Makha in Mansa, Punjab, India.
The family is employed collectively by the village’s farmers and gets paid in wheat, which they sell in the market to meet their expenses. January 29, 2017.

Farmers from 130 villages that have no access to canal water and are dependent on borewells for irrigation, burn an effigy during a protest in Dhuri in Malerkotla, Punjab, India. October 03, 2023.

Chopped maize, to be used as cattle fodder through the year, being unloaded in a pit outside a farmer’s home in Bhaini Bagha in Mansa, Punjab, India. July 25, 2023.

A farmer sleeps atop his paddy harvest at the Grain Market in Bathinda, Punjab, India. November 09, 2023.

Earlier in October, untimely rains across the state damaged standing paddy crop and caused high moisture content in the harvested paddy.

Government regulations do not allow paddy with more than 17% moisture content to be purchased by the agencies, while many farmers report as much as 20 to 24%. They either sell it to commission agents who deduct 2% from the overall weight to account for excess moisture or wait at the markets hoping the grain dries.

Farmers are well aware of pressures and want to diversify into less water-hungry crops—many have taken to sowing maize as a third crop during the summer months, resulting in even more extraction of groundwater. Yet the safety net of a Minimum Support Price, or an assured price from the government, for rice remains a powerful incentive to continue paddy cultivation.