Green Revolution Transforms South Asian Agriculture

Date

c. 1966 (peak adoption mid-1960s onward)

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

South Asia (India, Pakistan), with global reach

Era

Contemporary

Significance

The Green Revolution was a sweeping transformation of agriculture that brought high-yielding crop varieties, chemical fertilisers, irrigation, and modern farming methods to the developing world, with a decisive breakthrough in South Asia around 1966.

Building on Norman Borlaug's semi-dwarf, disease-resistant wheat developed in Mexico, India imported some 18,000 tons of dwarf wheat seed in 1966, while the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines released the high-yielding rice variety IR8 the same year. Championed in India by scientist M. S. Swaminathan and agriculture minister C. Subramaniam, the program helped wheat yields nearly double in India and Pakistan between 1965 and 1970, ending the food crises of 1964-1966 and moving the region toward grain self-sufficiency. By the early 1970s India had become a food exporter for the first time since independence. Borlaug, often called the father of the Green Revolution, received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and is credited with helping save up to a billion people from starvation, though the revolution also drew criticism for its reliance on fertilisers, water, and environmental costs.

Empires active in c. 1966 (peak adoption mid-1960s onward)

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Solomonic dynasty
  1270 CE – 1974 CE
• Dutch Empire
  1581 CE – 1975 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Apollo 11 Moon landing
  20 July 1969 (mission 16–24 July 1969)
• Intel Releases the 4004, the First Commercial Microprocessor
  1971
• Invention of the integrated circuit
  1958–1959
• Launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite
  4 October 1957
• The Apple II Launches the Personal Computer Era
  1977
• Discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA
  25 April 1953

Also relevant

• First human heart transplant
  3 December 1967
• The Tokyo Olympics And The First Shinkansen
  1964

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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