The Wheat That Fed a Nation

In March 1963, an American plant breeder named Norman Borlaug arrived in India. He had come at the invitation of a young Indian scientist, M. S. Swaminathan, and together the two men travelled through the wheat-growing plains of the north, walking the fields and talking with farmers.

They were asking one question. Could the short, sturdy wheat that had changed farming in Mexico do the same for India?

The country badly needed an answer. Its population was growing fast, and its farms were not keeping up.

A memory of hunger

Swaminathan was born in 1925 in Kumbakonam, in present-day Tamil Nadu. As a young man he lived through the years of the Bengal famine of 1943, in which millions of people died. He later said that the famine was what turned him away from the career his family had expected and towards the science of growing food.

He studied plant genetics in India, in the Netherlands and at the University of Cambridge. He was offered work abroad, but he chose to come home. By the early 1960s he was working at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi.

Norman Borlaug had grown up on a farm in Iowa. Since 1944 he had worked in Mexico, breeding wheat that could resist a disease called rust. To save time, he grew two crops a year at two different places, one high in the mountains and one in the warm north, so that each new generation could be tested twice as fast.

The problem of falling wheat

Borlaug had discovered something important. The old wheat varieties were tall and thin. When farmers gave them more water and fertiliser, the plants grew heavy heads of grain and then simply fell over, flat on the ground, before harvest.

So he crossed his wheat with a short Japanese variety. The new plants had strong, stubby stems. They could carry far more grain without falling. By the late 1950s, Mexico was growing all the wheat it needed.

When Swaminathan read about these short wheats, he wrote to Borlaug. Seeds were sent, and in 1963 and 1964 they were tested in trial plots at the institute in Delhi and at other centres. The results were remarkable. With enough water and fertiliser, the new wheat gave far bigger harvests than anything Indian farmers had grown before.

But a good result in a research plot is not the same as a good harvest in a village.

Seeds across the sea

In 1965 and again in 1966, the monsoon failed. India was already buying large amounts of wheat from abroad, much of it as food aid from the United States. People spoke of the country living "from ship to mouth", as each cargo of grain was unloaded and sent straight out to be eaten.

The Food and Agriculture Minister, C. Subramaniam, backed the scientists, even though many officials doubted that foreign seed would suit Indian soil. In 1966, India imported about 18,000 tonnes of Mexican wheat seed, the largest shipment of seed the world had seen at that time.

Swaminathan believed farmers would trust what they could see with their own eyes. So the new wheat was planted in demonstration plots on farmers' own land, where neighbours could watch it grow. In Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, farmers who had wells and canals tried it first. Many dug new tube wells to give the crop the water it needed.

There were surprises. The Mexican grain was reddish, and Indian families were used to wheat the colour of amber. Indian breeders crossed the new varieties again and produced amber-grained wheats, such as Kalyan Sona and Sonalika, which made good chapatis and sold well.

The harvest of 1968

In 1968, the wheat harvest was the biggest India had ever gathered. That same year India issued a postage stamp to mark the "Wheat Revolution", and an American official, William Gaud, gave the wider change a name that stuck: the Green Revolution.

Within a few years, India no longer depended on food aid to feed its people. Farm families in the wheat belt earned more than they ever had. Many could send their children to school, build brick houses and buy their own tractors.

In 1970, Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work against hunger. In 1987, Swaminathan received the first World Food Prize. Both men always said that the real heroes were the farmers.

The other side of the harvest

The story did not end there, and it would not be honest to stop at the celebration.

The new wheat, and the high-yielding rice that followed, needed a great deal of water and fertiliser. Over the decades, so many tube wells were sunk in Punjab and Haryana that the groundwater has fallen year after year. Heavy use of fertilisers and pesticides, and growing the same two crops again and again, has worn out the soil in many places. Many old local varieties were no longer grown. And the biggest gains went to farmers who already had land and water, not to the poorest.

Swaminathan himself warned of these dangers as early as the late 1960s. In later life he called for what he named an "evergreen revolution": growing more food while caring for the soil, the water and the farmer together.

He died in 2023 at the age of 98, and in 2024 he was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour.

Want to read more?

Leon Hesser's The Man Who Fed the World tells Norman Borlaug's life story, including his years in India. M. S. Swaminathan's own writings, such as From Green to Evergreen Revolution, explain both the achievements of those years and the work that still remains.