Silencing the critics of Indian green revolution, who have been arguing that its achievements were short-lived and that a fatigue had set in a long ago, a senior Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) official on Friday said there is ample proof to show that the country is still going through a green revolution which is rather a silent one.

The productivity gains of Indian agriculture in the post-Green Revolution (GR) era have been fantastic and they are even seen even in rain-fed crop areas such as Rajasthan," said Yadav from ICAR's Central Arid Zone Research Institute (ICAR-CAZRI), Jodhpur. While addressing a plenary section at the 106th Indian Science Congress here, Yadav talked about an interesting analysis carried out by him and other ICAR scientists.

"We divided the period between 1950 and 2018 into four equal phases of 17 years each and analysed annual productivity gains achieved by four major crops -- rice, wheat, maize and pearl millet -- during each of these periods," he said.

"While wheat productivity increased by 12 kg per hectare (kg/ha) in each year before the pre-GR era between 1950-1966, during the GR period it rose to 41 kg/ha annually. During the next era (1984-2001) it was 30 per cent more than the GR era, it came slightly to 36 kg/ha in the subsequent phase, which is still good," Yadav said. In the case of rice, in the first phase the annual productivity gain was mere 16 kg/ha, which went up to 19 kg/ha during the GR era. But in the next two phases the productivity gains were 32 and 42 kg/ha.

The data is part of a soon-to-be-published study by Yadav and others and was presented to the scientists for the first time at the Science Congress.

If this was the case of wheat and rice, the crops that were the focus of the GR, the performance of maize and pearl millet which are mainly grown in rain-fed areas, thus outside the geographical areas of Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh, where high-yielding hybrid rice ad wheat varieties were grown. The annual productivity improvement in maize was 25 kg/ha in the initial phase which further increased to 38 kg/ha during the subsequent periods. Pearl millet, 60 per cent of whose total production is from Rajasthan, where low rainfall is very common, too had a spectacular improvement in productivity. While the average annual increase in yield of pearl millet was 5 kg/ha in pre-GR era, it rose to 7 kg/ha in the GR period.

But since then, it was seen a further annual yield increase of 19 kg/ha and 31 kg/ha, which is nothing but spectacular, Yadav said.

For a crop to increase its productivity, three things are very important -- technology, policy support and demand. The improvement in the productivity of wheat and rice is the outcome of technology, policy and demand. Because as we were producing more, the government was procuring them at minimum support prices and supplying them through public distribution system. For maize there was no policy support, but still the area went up because there was demand. "When we come to pearl millet, with the improvement in productivity, the area came down as there was no demand. So, the improvement in pearl millet was entirely due to productivity," he said.

It was very clear that in the post-GR era I, the productivity has been nearly 50 per cent higher than the GR period. The rate of productivity of the crops increase has been higher in each phase and the rate of productivity gain in the post-GR era was higher than the GR period, Yadav argued.

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