Two Bad Years Impacted Overall Growth The Green Revolution is said to have revolutionized agriculture in India. However, government data shows more or less the same rate of growth of yields for various crops from 1951 to about 1990, suggesting that the ‘revolution’ might not have been as momentous as it is believed to be. In the India Rural Development Report 2012-13 released on Thursday, the average annual growth rate in yield per hectare for different crops shows that the Green Revolution period (1968-1980) showed 3.3% growth in yield per hectare for wheat compared to 3.7% before it and 3.6% in the decade following. The 2.7% growth rate for rice yields during the Green Revolution compared to 3.2% before and 3% after it. The relatively low growth in yield in what has been defined as the Green Revolution period can partly be attributed to the choice of years, explained Planning Commission member Abhijit Sen. “This period includes two years, 1972-73 and 1979-80, which were very bad years for agriculture,” he pointed out. If these years are excluded, the growth rates for the period would certainly look better, he said. Also, if the period were to be taken from 1967-68 rather than from 1968-69, it would make a difference since 1967-68 was a year of high growth following a bad year in 1966-67. However, Sen added, what the data does show is that the Green Revolution did not have as big an impact seen in a pan-Indian context. It was when it was extended to more areas in the 1980s that the impact was really felt. Sen pointed out that the period from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s was the worst. The reasons for that, he felt, was a “general neglect of agriculture” by the government. This included a decline in public investment in the sector, the weakening of extension services and so on. “As the data shows, once that neglect was reversed post-2004-05, growth picked up again,” Sen said. In the decade from 1997 to 2006, the growth rate in yield per hectare plummeted for every crop barring cotton, which showed a huge increase since 2002, from -6.2% to 19.4%, which could be due to the introduction of BT cotton. The significance of public spending on agriculture is evident in the improvement in growth rate of yield per hectare for almost every crop from the mid-2000s with increase in public spending.