Prakash Kumar - The History and the Present of the Green Revolution

The resource-intensive, extractive model of agriculture that India embraced in the 1960s helped the nation tide over food scarcity and yet ambivalences towards such agrarian transitions to productivity have remained. Critics have accused the green revolution of inflicting socio-economic and ecological injustices. This talk examines the long historical past that paved the path to the green revolution and was folded into its history and its present. As the green revolution carved its place in technocratic celebrations of pulling India out of food scarcity, the prior history of efforts to improve yield, the alternate beliefs in reforms and community participation, and of colonial era developments were forgotten. The argument contends that colonial legacies and a twentieth-century history of partition and incoming refugees from Pakistan, Nehruvian ideals of community participation, decolonizing perspectives of land reforms, and post-independence reconstruction were rolled into this momentous agrarian transformation. This contingent history of India's green revolution is often hidden by a dominant technocratic perspective that speaks of moments, magical silver bullets, and the wondrous efficacy of steps taken by a postcolonial bureaucracy.

Prakash Kumar, Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University

Free and open to the public; registration required. Please email [email protected] with any questions.

Hosted by the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. Supported by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University.

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