(a) Examine the objectives and components of the Green Revolution in India. (20 marks) (b) Why does inter-State disparity in…

Post-independence Indian economic development reflects a structural triad: transforming agricultural productivity, redressing spatial growth divergence, and promoting labour-intensive micro-enterprises to generate inclusive employment.

Objectives and Components of the Green Revolution

Initiated in the mid-1960s to break the "ship-to-mouth" vulnerability under US PL-480, the Green Revolution aimed at attaining national food self-sufficiency, stabilising macro-level foodgrain prices to insulate real wages, and augmenting farm incomes to stimulate rural demand.

Its core rested on a coordinated technological package:

1. High-Yielding Varieties (HYV) responsive to intensive inputs, notably dwarf wheat strains such as Kalyan Sona and Sonalika, followed by IR-8 rice.
2. Controlled irrigation through tube wells and canals, which was essential for HYV biological responsiveness.
3. High doses of chemical inputs (NPK fertilizers, pesticides).
4. Expansion of institutional credit through Primary Agricultural Credit Societies and nationalised commercial banks.
5. Price-risk mitigation and public procurement via the Agricultural Prices Commission (now CACP) through Minimum Support Prices (MSP) and the Food Corporation of India.

Critically examined, the first phase remained a localised "Wheat Revolution" concentrated in Punjab, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh due to their established canal infrastructure and larger landholdings. The subsequent "Rice Revolution" spread to eastern and southern tracts with varied success. While it eliminated aggregate food deficits, this input-intensive regime generated severe regional concentration, monocropping distortions, groundwater depletion, soil toxicity, and secondary salinity, leaving dryland and rainfed tracts historically underdeveloped.

Persistence of Inter-State Income Disparities

Despite planned interventions and equalization grants, regional income divergence persists due to structural, policy, and market mechanisms:

Structural and Historical Legacies: Favourable agro-climatic endowments and colonial-era spatial preferences toward port presidencies created deep historical advantages in physical infrastructure and market access, disadvantaging the hinterlands.

Policy and Fiscal Distortions: Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS) with uniform co-financing requirements place disproportionate burdens on fiscally constrained poorer States. Furthermore, historical policies like the Freight Equalisation Scheme stripped eastern States of location-specific resource advantages without fostering indigenous manufacturing capacity.

New Economic Geography Perspective: Regional divergence can be explained through Paul Krugman’s core-periphery model of cumulative circular causation. Fiscally sound, advanced States (e.g., Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu) leverage superior human capital, established industrial ecosystems, and agglomeration economies to attract the bulk of private investment and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Conversely, poorer States suffer human capital out-migration and low internal revenue generation. Consequently, per capita income Gini coefficients and NITI Aayog’s SDG India Index demonstrate widening spatial divergence rather than neoclassical income convergence.

Challenges Facing Small-Scale and Cottage Industries

Small-scale and cottage industries remain vulnerable across multiple dimensions:

Credit and Financial Constraints: Inadequate access to formal institutional credit forces reliance on high-cost informal channels. Strict collateral requirements, delayed credit disbursements, and systemic delays in receiving receivables from large buyers erode their working capital base.

Technological and Market Disadvantages: Low investment in R&D and primitive production methods depress total factor productivity. Cottage units suffer from weak forward linkages, inadequate standardization, and poor integration into digital e-commerce supply chains and public procurement platforms.

Regulatory Burdens: Multi-layered compliance requirements—including intricate GST return mechanisms, complex local labour laws, and procedural delays in securing environmental clearances—disproportionately increase transaction costs for micro-enterprises.

Scale and Trade Pressures: Micro-enterprises face severe competition from the domestic organised corporate sector and cheap imports following Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Flagship interventions such as the Prime Minister’s Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP) and the Scheme of Fund for Regeneration of Traditional Industries (SFURTI) remain constrained by sub-scale fund allocations, procedural friction, and insufficient common facility infrastructure.

Sustaining long-term inclusive growth requires transitioning from input-heavy cereal farming to climate-resilient agriculture, adopting asymmetric fiscal transfers to break regional circular causation, and modernising cottage clusters through accessible credit and technology networks.