The Green Revolution

In The late 1960’s a government electrification program was bringing the world to India’s hundreds of thousands of villages, and the Green Revolution was introducing hybrid grains, mechanization, and more efficient irrigation. There was a philosophical debate about how this restructuring would eventually affect the ecology and distribution of land and wealth by gradually taking resources from subsistence farmers and transferring them to wealthy land owners. However, the population was growing by a million a month, and the necessity of modernizing agricultural production was more important than the long term ecological consequences of pesticides, chemical fertilizers and altering the demographics of rural India.

As it turned out, even the water table would be affected. In order for these miracle crops to grow they needed an abundance of water. An over extraction of ground water caused by increased irrigation would deplete the aquifer faster than it could be replenished.