How Green is Green Revolution? Part I

Word green in old English means ‘to grow’. Color green has always been associated with prosperity, sustainability, hope, and nature. Color of many national flags has an inseparable green. At least a million web addresses have term green in their domain names. So much so, thoughts, sometimes are called green.
In India, for a considerable time and even now, term green has been seldom used without a ‘red-word'- called revolution. Together these two terms account for a Nobel Prize, one World Food Prize, two Prime Ministers, one agricultural minister, one leading research institution and two agricultural universities, two and a half states, countless flourishing fertilizer and pesticide companies. Nation’s empty stomachs are sated by the silos of food-grains entirely filled by the waves of green-revolution. There’s a new fourth version of iPhone on the shelf. Time goes by and after 50 or so odd and even years, India has unofficially launched green-revolution II.
We took 50 years to realize that Green Revolution I (sometimes it is fancy to add numeric adjectives in the rear, Tendulkar 10, Ronaldo 9, Jordan 23, and so on) also means just two and half states out of 29, hunger alleviation for just half of the nation, more than 200,000 farmer suicides, no one looking at more than half of nation’s land which is non-irrigated, high levels of toxicity in the ground water and poor land condition in two and half states, and recent plan to plant reverse osmosis units in entire Punjab! Scores of poor farmers falling into a Urea-DAP-SSP-Endosulfan-Thaili Wala Beej-Diesel-Debt-Poor production-Suicide trap, millions of families fleeing to cities for non-agricultural jobs, 40% of total farmers not willing to go for crop-cultivation and recent government projection that says 6-15% of country’s population will depend on agriculture are the subsidiary products of enchanted slogan ‘green-revolution’.

Surprisingly, green-revolution statistics didn’t correspond to the average increase in income of more than half of nation’s farmers. There’s employment guarantee in rural India. Revenue from fertilisers and pesticides when combined with the subsidy given to the owner companies will no doubt overwhelm the total income from farm of all the farmers in India. And it would almost be ten times the income of poor small and marginal farmers. There’s an extension system for agricultural information to be disseminated in villages. Total employees of government departments, organizations, government schemes, and central or state committees on ‘sustainable agriculture’, in my opinion, would outnumber poor farmers who understand ‘sustainable agriculture’ let alone envisioning it.

Yet, a dialog has to be made between this large ‘producer’ force and our ‘political; government/s. Sometimes,

I wonder, do we even need a dialog with a blind and deaf government which has to appoint a committee for every single thing in the country- child-labor, female foeticide, honor-killing, rapes, communal and regional unrest in all four corners and center of the nation, and fraud in a not-so-sportsmanlike games event?