TWO MAJOR crises have emerged on an unprecedented scale in Asian societies during the 1980s. The first is the ecological crisis and the threat to life support systems posed by the destruction of natural resources like forests, land, water and genetic resources. The second is the cultural and ethnic crisis and the erosion of social structures that make cultural diversity and plurality possible as a democratic reality in a decentralised framework. The two crises are usually viewed as independent, both analytically as well as at the level of political action.

The tragedy of Punjab - of the thousands of innocent...

IN 1970, Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ‘a new world situation with regard to nutrition..’. According to the Nobel Prize Committee, ‘the kinds of grain which are the result of Dr Borlaug’s work speed economic growth in general in the developing countries.’¹ The ‘miracle seeds’ that Borlaug had created were seen as a source of new abundance and peace. Science was awarded for having a magical ability to solve problems of material scarcity and violence.

‘Green Revolution’ is the name given to this sciencebased transformation of Third World agriculture, and the Indian Punjab was its most...

IN THE 1950s, when Borlaug created the semi-dwarf high yielding variety of wheat, a new religion was born - the religion of the Green Revolution which - promised abundance through the ‘miracle seeds’. In 1960, when Borlaug addressed scientists and United Nations officials in Rome, he proposed setting up a programme in Mexico for training agronomists from across the world. True to the religious mould, he called it the ‘Practical school of wheat apostles’. The Rockefeller Foundation gave the finances, the FAO, its stamp of intergovernmental legitimisation, and the Mexican government, its facilities.

‘Borlaug’s apostles - who initially came from...

PUNJAB has rich alluvial soils, characteristic of much of the Indo-Gangetic plains of North India.

Of these soils, Howard and Wad had said:

‘... field records of ten centuries prove that the land produces fair crops year after year without falling infertility. A perfect balance has been reached between the manurial requirements of the crops harvested and the natural processes which recuperate fertility.’¹

And in his presidential address to the Agriculture section of the Indian Science Congress, G Clarke had said,

‘When we examine the facts, we must put the Northern Indian cultivator down as the most economical farmer in...

WHEREVER the ‘miracle’ seeds of the Green Revolution went, they created a new thirst for water. Intensive chemicals and intensive irrigation were the two means used in Green Revolution agriculture to ‘augment’ land and improve soil fertility. Instead, they created land degradation and hence land scarcity, even while they created an addiction to pesticides, fertilizers and intensive water use. This chapter traces how intensive agriculture demanded intensive water use and created wasteland instead of increasing land productivity, and how it created new demands and unresolvable conflicts over water resources.

Punjab literally means the land of five rivers. The prosperity of...

THE ecological costs and natural resource conflicts associated with the Green Revolution were rooted in the replacement of cropping systems based on diversity and internal inputs with systems based on uniformity and external inputs. The shift from internal to externally purchased inputs did not merely change ecological processes of agriculture. It also changed the structure of social and political relationships, from those based on mutual (though asymmetric) obligations - within the village to relations of each cultivator directly with banks, seed and fertilizer agencies, food procurement agencies, and electricity and irrigation organisations. Further since all the externally supplied inputs were...

THE PUNJAB crisis, characterised by violence and discontent, is in large measure linked to the unanticipated effects of the technological fix of the Green Revolution which was ironically aimed at preventing violence and containing discontent through the technological transformation of Indian agriculture. The main elements of the technological fix of the first Green Revolution were:

1. the replacement of diverse mixed crops and rotational cropping patterns of cereals, pulses and oilseeds produced primarily for self-consumption, with monocultures of introduced wheat and rice varieties produced primarily for the market.

2. the substitution of internal resources of the farm with purchased inputs...

IN the dominant paradigm, technology is seen as being above society both in its structure and its evolution, in its offering technological fixes, and in its technological determinism. It is seen as a source of solution to problems that lie in society, and is rarely perceived as a source of new social problems. Its course is viewed as being self-determined. In periods of rapid technological transformation, it is assumed that society and people must adjust to that change, instead of technological change adjusting to the social values of equity, sustainability and participation.

There is, however, another perspective which treats technological...