When India was at war with Pakistan in 1965, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri asked Indians to miss a meal on Mondays. The next year, a minister dug up his five-acre backyard in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi to sow wheat – the same spot where Home Minister Amit Shah now lives. And America, busy with the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, was plotting a giant Revolution in India.
As Indians chanted “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan”, scientists from the Pusa Institute anxiously waited at Mumbai’s docks for a consignment of magic seeds that would end hunger.
Such was its power that by 1968, the US-aided Green Revolution had transformed India from a ship-to-mouth shortage economy to a country that shut down schools and cinema theatres to store surplus food.
Half a century later, India attempted another farm revolution in 2020. But this time, the farmers themselves took to the streets in protest and won.
A hungry nation with ‘ship-to-mouth’ economy
India won its war against hunger with its combined arsenal of science, diplomacy, and political courage.
The man who deployed these weapons was C. Subramaniam. Selected especially to be the Union Minister of Food and Agriculture in 1964 during a food crisis, Subramaniam faced an uphill battle. Time was running out for India — in a 1961 report, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization predicted that India’s population would outstrip its food production in five years.