In the middle of the 1960s India was importing wheat under American food aid and two failed monsoons had produced a genuine emergency. Within about fifteen years the country had stopped importing staple grain, and one state — around one and a half per cent of India's land area — was supplying a share of the national foodgrain pool many times its size.
That is the achievement, and it was real. Understating it in order to get faster to the problems is a mistake people make about Punjab, and it is not fair to the generation who did the work. But the arrangement that produced it was built on assumptions about water that were not true, and Punjab has been paying for that ever since.
The Package
The Green Revolution is usually described as a seed, which is only the first quarter of it.
The seed mattered enormously. Traditional wheat, when heavily fertilised, grows tall, becomes top-heavy and falls over before harvest — so there was a hard ceiling on how much you could feed it. The semi-dwarf varieties developed by Norman Borlaug in Mexico put their growth into the grain rather than the stalk, and stood up under fertiliser. Trials in India from 1963 under M. S. Swaminathan established that they worked here, and the seed was distributed at scale from 1966.
The other three quarters were fertiliser, water and money. Chemical fertiliser at subsidised prices. Assured irrigation, first from canals and increasingly from tubewells. And, decisively, a guaranteed buyer: minimum support prices and government procurement, so that a farmer who took on the cost and risk of the new package knew that the crop would be bought.
None of those pieces works alone. Together they changed what a field in Punjab could produce within a single decade.
Why Punjab
Punjab was chosen because it was the place where the package would work fastest.
It had the largest canal system in the subcontinent, built under British administration across the nineteenth century. It had consolidated landholdings — Punjab had run one of India's most thorough land consolidation programmes in the 1950s, so a farmer's land was in one block rather than scattered strips, which made irrigation and mechanisation feasible. It had comparatively high rural literacy, a strong network of cooperatives, and Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana to do the extension work. And it had a farming class with capital, ambition and a recent history of rebuilding from nothing after 1947.
It worked. Yields rose steeply, then kept rising. Tractors, tubewells, threshers and rural electrification spread through the state within a generation. Doaba and Malwa villages that had been sending sons abroad for lack of land now had land that produced far more.
A state that had been cut in half twenty years earlier was feeding a subcontinent.
The Second Crop
The trouble began with a success. Wheat is a winter crop, and the same fields were idle through the summer monsoon. Adding a second crop meant paddy — and paddy in Punjab is agriculture against the grain of the place.
Punjab is semi-arid. Rice wants standing water through the hottest months of the year, and the canals could not supply anything like enough of it. The gap was made up with tubewells, and tubewells run on electricity, and electricity for agriculture in Punjab has been supplied free or near-free since the late 1990s.
Put those three facts together and the outcome follows mechanically. There is no meter on the pump, no charge for the water, and a guaranteed price for the crop. Every individual farmer is behaving entirely rationally. The aquifer is not consulted.
By the 1980s water tables were measurably falling across central Punjab. Today the great majority of the state's assessed blocks are classified as over-exploited by the Central Ground Water Board, meaning more water is drawn each year than is replaced. Submersible pumps have gone down through depths that a farmer in 1970 would have found unimaginable, and each replacement is a capital cost that falls on the household.
What Else It Cost
The groundwater is the largest bill but not the only one.
Monoculture. Almost the entire state runs the same wheat-paddy rotation, because those are the two crops procurement actually guarantees. That is fragile agronomically, it has drained soil micronutrients, and it makes the whole state's income dependent on two policy decisions taken in Delhi.
Inputs and debt. The package requires purchased seed, fertiliser, pesticide, diesel and machinery every season. When yields plateaued in the 1990s while input costs kept climbing, the margin compressed. Punjab's farm indebtedness, and the suicides that accompanied it in the cotton belt of the Malwa in particular, are the direct arithmetic of that squeeze on small holdings.
Stubble burning. Paddy leaves a heavy residue and the window between clearing it and sowing wheat is narrow, so it gets burned, and the smoke ends up over Delhi every autumn. It is a symptom of the rotation, not a separate problem.
The land itself. Holdings continue to subdivide with each generation while the cost of farming rises, which is one reason the emigration that has run out of the Doaba for a century has not slowed.
Why It Is So Hard to Change
Everyone involved agrees that Punjab should diversify away from paddy. It has been the stated policy for decades and it has barely moved, for a reason that is easy to state and hard to solve: the guarantee only covers two crops.
A farmer with five acres and a loan can switch to maize or pulses and take the market price, or stay with paddy and take the assured one. As an individual decision it is not close. Diversification requires that procurement, prices and water pricing all change together, and every one of those changes hurts somebody immediately while the benefit arrives years later.
That is the background to the farm laws of 2020, and to the year-long protest that brought Punjabi farmers to the borders of Delhi. Whatever one makes of the legislation, the intensity of the response is not explicable without this history. Procurement is not a subsidy to Punjabi farmers as far as they are concerned. It is the other half of a bargain the state made in 1966, when it was asked to grow the nation's food and rebuilt its entire agriculture to do it.
The Ledger
It is possible to hold both halves of this at once, and Punjab mostly does.
The Green Revolution ended famine as a live prospect in India, and Punjabi farmers did that. It also produced a farming system that consumes an irreplaceable aquifer to grow a crop the climate does not support, sustained by prices that cannot easily be withdrawn.
The generation that built it was solving the problem in front of them, which was that people did not have enough to eat. They solved it. The problem in front of the next generation is water, and it is a harder one, because the first solution is what created it.