Lal Bahadur Shastri’s Green Revolution meets India’s water and soil crisis
The Green Revolution transformed India’s food security, but its intensive farming model has also deepened pressure on groundwater and soil. As India now pushes crop diversification, Lal Bahadur Shastri’s Jai Kisan legacy raises a sharper question: can food security endure without resource security?
On Lal Bahadur Shastri’s birth anniversary, his most famous call — “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” — is usually remembered as a tribute to the soldier and farmer. But nearly six decades later, the farmer at the centre of that slogan faces a very different crisis: depleted groundwater, declining soil health and an increasingly uncertain climate.
That makes Shastri’s agricultural legacy worth revisiting, not as a modern environmental doctrine, but as a question of what food security means when the resources sustaining it are under stress.
When Shastri became Prime Minister in 1964, India was struggling with food shortages, drought and dependence on imported grain. His government pushed agricultural modernisation and gave political backing to the scientific work that would help lay the foundations for the Green Revolution. Shastri appointed C Subramaniam as food and agriculture minister, while scientists including M S Swaminathan worked on adapting high-yielding varieties to Indian conditions.
The objective was immediate: produce more food with greater reliability. The transformation that followed would eventually take India from chronic food deficiency to food surplus. The Green Revolution, however, was not simply about better seeds. It depended on irrigation, fertilisers, pesticides and intensive cultivation, particularly of wheat and rice.
And that success created a second problem.
The same agricultural system that dramatically increased production also intensified pressure on natural resources. NITI Aayog has noted that the expansion of Green Revolution technology encouraged monocropping, greater nutrient extraction and groundwater use beyond recharge in several regions. The government itself has acknowledged that imbalanced fertiliser use and groundwater over-extraction have contributed to the deterioration of natural resources.
Punjab offers the clearest warning. ICAR says the state’s intensive rice-wheat system is associated with falling water tables, while its agricultural soils are showing multi-nutrient deficiencies and low organic carbon.
So what does Shastri’s agricultural legacy look like in 2026?
The policy vocabulary has begun changing. In August, the government cited ICAR research showing a mismatch between existing cropping patterns and groundwater availability across several water-stressed states. It identified crop diversification as a route towards more sustainable alternatives to cereal-dominated systems.
The Crop Diversification Programme is already attempting to move farmers in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh away from water-intensive paddy towards pulses, oilseeds and millets, while also seeking to restore soil fertility.
That brings the old slogan into a new context.
Shastri’s Jai Kisan was born from a food crisis. Today, protecting the farmer increasingly means protecting the water table, the soil and the ecological conditions that make farming possible.
The question India now faces is therefore not whether the Green Revolution succeeded. It did. The harder question is whether the next agricultural transformation can secure food without exhausting the resources needed to produce it.
