The Granary and the Water Table

In the autumn of 1965 a war with Pakistan was followed by a failing monsoon, and India's food stocks were thin. The country was importing millions of tonnes of wheat from the United States under the PL 480 programme, and the prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, is reported to have asked citizens to skip a meal each week. His slogan of that season, Jai Jawan Jai Kisan, joined the soldier and the farmer as the two defenders of the republic. Within a decade the country that had waited for foreign grain ships was building reserves of its own.

The change came from a bundle of decisions rather than a single miracle. The food minister C Subramaniam backed the import of high yielding dwarf wheat seeds that drew on the work of the agronomist Norman Borlaug, and scientists such as M S Swaminathan helped adapt them to Indian fields. The state guaranteed a minimum price, promised to buy the surplus, and subsidised fertiliser, electricity and irrigation. Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh answered with wheat and later rice, and the national wheat harvest roughly doubled between the mid 1960s and the early 1970s. Famine, which had defined the memory of colonial rule, receded from the national imagination.