Prakash Kumar’s deep dive into the history of India’s Green Revolution has three principal loci. The first is a pre-history of the Green Revolution in terms of investigating the colonial roots of agrarian modernisation in India. The second is, at the initiative of forward-looking politicians, civil servants and scientists, the introduction from the early 1960s of new technologies and institutional changes that together led to significant changes in agricultural yield. The third, and final, is the role of the United States and how the US-India interface impacted agricultural transformation. Put together, these three lenses combined with empirical depth and rigour, plus the use of a diverse set of sources, make for an engrossing and deeply informative work.A History of India’s Green Revolution, Prakash Kumar,Cambridge University Press, 2025.These lenses are applied to three distinct agro-economic zones long identified as the principal focus areas of the green revolution in wheat – Punjab, Western Uttar Pradesh and the Terai, now in Uttarakhand but earlier in Uttar Pradesh. In each of these, high yielding varieties of wheat sourced from the United States combined with an economic policy package significantly raised productivity leading to what is commonly termed as the Green Revolution.Both the Punjab and Western Uttar Pradesh had long been sites of state intervention in agricultural production. Western Uttar Pradesh had seen the earliest canal building projects of the colonial state and thereafter this region also saw the expansion of a railway network from the late 19th century. Canal construction was even more dramatic in the Punjab. In both the regions, the colonial state also invested in agricultural research and the agricultural institutes in Pusa (Delhi), Lyallpur (modern Faisalabad in West Punjab) and Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh).Kumar notes: “It is these two regions that the economic project of an imperial civilizing mission and the concurrent project of co-opting local cultivating elites could be seen clearly”. In this context he poses the question “Do colonial bureaucratic projects anticipate the later 20th century projects?”His answer veers towards yes. He argues, “Post- independence efforts launched in the agrarian realm can be historically placed at the backs of ideas swirling in the colonial era”. This is a valid enough point and reinforced by pre-independence state-led campaigns such as ‘Grow More Food,’ the investments in producing better quality seeds such as Pusa wheat and others. But it does carry the attendant risk of occasional overstatement that something dramatically novel or new is being said about modernisation in colonial times, viz: ‘Trends that became more defined after independence had their roots in these precursors in however nebulous a form that were fashioned out of them.” That agrarian modernisation had a century-long history before the ‘Green Revolution’ has long been well accepted and the limits and shortcomings of this colonial modernisation have been charted out by economic historians since the 1970s.Also read: India Must Support Its Oilseed FarmersThere can, however, be little doubt that both Western Uttar Pradesh and Punjab possessed elements of critical infrastructure required for breaking the ground for the future Green Revolution. A network of canals and irrigation, using improved seeds, a land landholding structure in which peasant proprietorship was the predominant form of land tenure met certain critical preconditions for increases in yield. With independence came new forces. Kumar argues that “the shifting axis of the cold war theatre of super power rivalry to Asia brought cold war modernisers with deep implications for the emergent Indian story of rural and agrarian modernisation”. US universities and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were among the instruments used for this process. This coincided also with the new sovereign government of India rolling out its Community Development Programme (CDP) and the National Extension Service to address the multitude of issues thrown up by partition in North and Eastern India and more generally to address the country wide issues of rural poverty and underdevelopment. The US-India agricultural interface also had a pre–Cold War history and Kumar’s detailing of these antecedents in the American Presbyterian missionary initiatives in Allahabad, UP, from the first decade of the 20th century comprise a very interesting section in the book. The Rockefeller Foundation played some role in this too in the early 20th century thus anticipating its much larger contribution in the Green Revolution of the 1960s by way of providing the high yielding varieties of seeds it developed in Mexico. The book ably details these processes without letting a vast mass of empirical evidence and data interrupt its narrative flow. Its great merit also lies in bringing out the close personal ties and professional relationships that developed between US technocrats and Indian political leaders and senior civil servants and scientists. While there was a great deal of state-level enterprise and initiative at play, the Union government’s role was decisive as the CDP came under the oversight of the Planning Commission.The Terai was also soon in focus and was to be “looked upon as an untapped land mass” which could be converted into a granary for the entire region. It had in addition the potential for settling refugees from West Punjab in Pakistan. Here again continuities from the colonial past creep in. From at least World War I, the Terai had been seen as a site where demobilised soldiers could be given land for agricultural colonisation and resettlement. After World War II this process gathered additional traction. Post independence these earlier templates acquired even greater energy with the agents being refugees and “political sufferers”. Kumar is also right to stress that the subsequent story of agricultural extension and modernisation in the Terai also has a parallel history of land grab with local communities being left out and often dispossessed and these feed into the history of how Uttarakhand came to be constituted as a separate state with the Terai an important constituent part.It was however in the Punjab that the entire package associated with the Green Revolution was concentrated and it was therefore this state that ‘became the poster child of high yielding varieties modernisation”. US interests were also much more sharply focused than elsewhere in India. The establishment of the United States Agency for International Development-funded (USAID-funded) Punjab Agricultural University and the High-Yielding Variety (HYV) seeds developed in Mexico by the Rockefeller Foundation found in Punjab, formed a local ecosystem that was entirely supportive.As is well known, Punjab had been the site of agrarian modernisation in colonial times – canal irrigation, peasant proprietors, supportive agrarian laws and market-oriented production. Partition, however, created a unique set of circumstances. In this environment ,with a relatively weak political class, bureaucratic technocrats had to face up to the challenge whereby the truncated Indian Punjab inherited 45% of the population, 33% of the area and 31% of the income of the undivided province. Refugees had left behind 5.3 million acres of land in West Punjab but only 3.8 million of evacuee lands were available in Indian Punjab. There was also a significant imbalance in terms of irrigated versus unirrigated and between lands left behind and what was now available.The 1950s and the 1960s saw an emphasis on land consolidation, development of infrastructure including rural credit, irrigation and agricultural extension. In this background, the dwarf seeds developed by Rockefeller breeders in Mexico, monsoon failures in 1964 and 1965 and significant food deficits leading to large PL 480 imports of wheat, all became part of a cluster of changes that enabled the pushing through of a policy that hinged on the widespread use of HYV seeds.Some of the individuals who populate this story also stand out: political figures such as Charan Singh in Western Uttar Pradesh who by pushing though a radical, for the times, land reform agenda empowered peasant proprietors and thus laid the ground for the HYV phase. In the Terai, G.B. Pant’s role in pushing for settling Punjab refugees similarly stands out. In contrast in the particular circumstances of post partition Punjab, it is technocrats and civil servants who came to the fore and they effectively dethroned the politician where the state’s agricultural modernisation story is concerned with individuals such as M.S. Randhawa, Tarlok Singh and others.Also read: ‘Even Our Apple is Political’: Indo-US Trade Deal, Climate Stress and Conflict Threaten Kashmir’s FarmersThe US cast is equally significant, the architect Albert Mayer who built up strong relationships with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Pant in the early years of the CDP in Uttar Pradesh and US Ambassador Chester Bowles, and others. And then at the final stages, amidst the crop failures of 1964 and 1965, it is individuals at the helm of affairs in the government of India who move centre stage. C. Subramaniam as the minister concerned and B. Sivaraman as the secretary of the ministry did much to push through widespread use of HIV seeds. This analysis is in part also a useful corrective to studies which see India in the 1950s and 1960s as lacking policy coherence and of state incapacity in making institutional and structural changes. In fact: “India was more or less trying to throw the entire kitchen sink at its massive problems of underdevelopment, poverty and misery wrought by colonial rule”.Kumar’s principal argument is worth recapitulating: the Green Revolution was the result of a fusion of domestic history and trajectory of rural development with continuities stretching back to the colonial period interfacing with an external impulse in the form of US outreach and push for agrarian modernisation as part of its larger strategic objectives in the era of the cold war. Thus, the green revolution was by no means either a simple transplant of a US template or the straightforward consequence of US outreach, nor was it the outcome of entirely local or national trajectories and initiatives. This book is a timely reminder of how very consequential changes emerge from a diverse range of often unconnected vectors and forces.In the book’s conclusion, some larger questions are posed about the critiques of the Green Revolution – that it deepened rural inequality without substantially mitigating rural poverty and that, over time, it caused major ecological harms. In some such accounts, the Green Revolution became ‘the tragedy of Punjab’, also linked to the militancy of the 1980s and later.If there is some substance to these views, they do not detract from the fact that the HYV revolution was successful in addressing its principal objective — overcoming the looming food shortages that the country faced. For the rest, these points of criticism are not so much about the Green Revolution per se but about modernity in general. But in so far as modernisation also represents progress, its absence would have also meant huge perhaps even greater costs.T.C.A. Raghavan is a former Indian High Commissioner to Singapore and Pakistan. His latest book is Circles of Freedom: Friendship, Love and Loyalty in the Indian National Struggle (Juggernaut, 2024).