A white touch to a refreshed green revolution

• Recently, India celebrated the 100th birth anniversary of Verghese Kurien, the leader of India’s ‘white revolution’. With the white revolution, he launched Operation Flood, which became the world's largest dairy development programme.
• Within 30 years, Operation Flood helped double milk available per person in India, making dairy farming India's largest self-sustainable rural employment generator.
• This success of the White revolution can be attributed to the cooperative or Amul model. The Amul Model gave farmers direct control over the resources they create, helping them direct their own development and market.

White Revolution:

• Operation Flood is the program that led to “White Revolution”.
• It created a national milk grid linking producers throughout India to consumers in over 700 towns and cities and reducing seasonal and regional price variations while ensuring that producers get a major share of the profit by eliminating the middlemen. At the bedrock of Operation Flood stands the village milk producers’ co-operatives, which procure milk and provide inputs and services, making modern management and technology available to all the members.

Associated Concerns With Green Revolution

• Mono-Cropping: Green Revolution is primarily focused on food grains including wheat, rice, jowar, bajra and maize, etc. However, it is wheat and rice which has benefited the most.
• It has wrested areas from coarse cereals, pulses and oilseeds.
• This has resulted in excess production of wheat and rice and shortages in most others today prevail side by side.
• Further, major commercial crops like cotton, jute, tea and sugarcane are also almost untouched by the Green Revolution.
• Regional Disparities: Green Revolution technology has given birth to growing disparities in economic development at inter and intra regional levels.
• The most benefited areas are Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh in the north and Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in the south.
• However, it has hardly touched the Eastern region and arid and semi-arid areas of Western and Southern India.
• Benefiting Big Farmers: Green revolution’s aim was to increase outputs by applying scientific breakthroughs with methods of management to obtain economies through scale.
• Green Revolution has benefited the big farmers as they have the financial resources to purchase farm implements, better seeds, fertilizers and can arrange for regular supply of irrigation water to the crops.
• Disguised Unemployment: Farm mechanization under Green Revolution has created widespread unemployment among agricultural labourers in the rural areas.
• The worst-hit are the poor and the landless people.
• Environmental Degradation: Green Revolution has led to degradation of the planet’s natural environment that has taken place with the application of modern technological solutions and management methods for the pursuit of economic growth.