Ship to Mouth

Lal Bahadur Shastri, born on this day in 1904, is remembered in most Indian homes for one slogan, "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan", hail the soldier, hail the farmer. Fewer people remember the other thing he asked for in 1965. He asked Indians to miss a meal on Mondays, and he started at home.

It wasn't a gesture about health or simplicity. The country was running out of food, and most of what it had was arriving by ship from the United States.

Living off the ships

Since the mid-1950s India had been buying surplus American grain under the Food for Peace programme, usually called PL 480 after the number of the law that created it. It was a good deal on paper. It also meant that in a bad year India's cities were fed from American farms.

By 1966, ThePrint has recounted, three ships a day were docking at Indian ports with grain from America. The phrase people used was "ship to mouth": the wheat went from the hold to the ration shop to the plate with nothing held back in between.

Then the monsoon failed, twice. In November 1965 the US Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman, cabled the White House from Rome with India's numbers. Foodgrain production of 88 million tons in 1964-65 would "drop at least 10 million tons". The drought was the "most serious of this century", and "virtually every area of India" had been hit. Consumption per head, already below the minimum UN nutritional standard, would fall from 174 kilograms a year to 152. The prediction of "substantial starvation", he wrote, "appears to be valid." A drop from 174 kilograms to 152 works out at about 60 grams less grain for every person, every day, in a country where the starting figure was already below the line.

The short tether

The President on the other end of that cable was Lyndon Johnson, and he had decided that American wheat would come with conditions.

India had to commit to growing more of its own food, and Johnson wanted to see it happen before he signed anything long. So Washington released grain a month or a few months at a time. On 19 September 1965, during the war on India's western border, the Under Secretary of State, George Ball, recommended extending India's agreement, and its neighbour's, for one month. "This would hold them on a short tether and keep them worried," he wrote. The phrase stuck, and the policy became known by it.

The American ambassador in Delhi, Chester Bowles, kept warning that it was backfiring. In November 1966 he cabled that India had "experienced the suspension of our aid and our short-tether policy of doling out PL 480 a few months at a time, a policy which whatever its advantages has made rational long-term planning in India impossible." The government, he added, was under heavy attack at home for its dependence on the United States.

That was the situation in which a prime minister asked his people to skip dinner. For a government that had just fought a war, being fed a month at a time by the country it had asked for help was humiliating, and the Monday fast was the one answer entirely in its own hands. Whatever it saved in grain, it told the country, and Washington, that India meant to stop needing the ships.

The seed

The way out had already been planted, on about seventy acres outside Delhi.

The journalist Harish Damodaran, writing in the Review of Agrarian Studies, traced it to a village called Jaunti, on the edge of Delhi near the Haryana border. In 1964 the wheat scientist M.S. Swaminathan put new short-stemmed Mexican varieties, bred by Norman Borlaug's team, on the fields of about fifteen farmers there. Traditional tall wheat collapsed under heavy fertiliser. The dwarf varieties held up, and they could carry far more grain.

Two of the Jaunti farmers beat the target yield. One of them, Hukum Singh, called the result "a marvel". In August 1964 the agriculture minister, C. Subramaniam, approved Swaminathan's proposal for 1,000 demonstrations on farmers' fields across the country, and by November 1965 the Jaunti farmers had formed a cooperative to multiply the seed.

Doing it at scale

Subramaniam had to defend the imports in Parliament, where he argued the country need not be ashamed of them. In November 1965 India agreed a farm package with the United States that, as ThePrint describes it, "explicitly listed subsidies and price incentives for agricultural inputs like fertiliser". It is easy to see that agreement as Johnson's tether doing its job. It is equally fair to say it was what Indian agricultural scientists had wanted all along, and the drought gave them the political cover to do it.

In the rabi season of 1966-67 Indian farmers planted 18,200 tonnes of imported Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A seed on 240,000 hectares. That was the real start of what came to be called the Green Revolution. By 1968 the harvest was a record, and surplus grain was being stored in schools and theatres.

Shastri did not see any of this. He died in Tashkent in January 1966, at the end of peace talks, less than two years into the job.

The bill

The varieties that saved India in the 1960s needed three things: fertiliser, guaranteed prices, and water. Punjab and Haryana had the soil and the farmers, and the state could supply the first two. The water came out of the ground.

Sixty years later Punjab is pumping far more than the rain puts back. Down To Earth, reporting the Central Ground Water Board's latest assessment, says the state extracted 26.32 billion cubic metres of groundwater against an annual recharge of 19.14, which is about 52 per cent more than it can sustain. Of its 153 assessment blocks, 111 are classified as over-exploited. The rice-and-wheat rotation that the Green Revolution locked in, with guaranteed government purchase of both, is the main reason. That isn't a failure of the scientists of 1965. It's a failure of every government since to change a system long after the emergency that justified it had passed.

Freeman's cable from Rome counted India's food in tons per head, 174 kilograms falling to 152. The fields at Jaunti counted it in mun per acre. Punjab's farmers now count it in how many metres deeper the borewell has to go.

Sources

• US Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XXV, South Asia, "Document 251: Telegram From the Embassy in Italy to the Department of State", November 1965 (Freeman's cable from Rome: 88 million tons falling by at least 10 million; the "most serious" drought of the century; consumption falling from 174 to 152 kilograms per head; the prediction of substantial starvation).
• Office of the Historian, FRUS 1964-1968, Volume XXV, "Document 216", 19 September 1965 (George Ball's recommendation to extend the food agreements by one month, "This would hold them on a short tether and keep them worried").
• Office of the Historian, FRUS 1964-1968, Volume XXV, "Document 388: Telegram From the Embassy in India to the Department of State", 8 November 1966 (Bowles on the short-tether policy of doling out PL 480 a few months at a time, and the domestic attacks on the Indian government over its dependence).
• ThePrint, "Hungry India, a nawabi US President, 'Mexican blood': The real story of Green Revolution", February 2022 (Shastri's appeal to miss a meal on Mondays; three grain ships a day in 1966; Subramaniam's defence of the imports in Parliament; the November 1965 agreement listing fertiliser subsidies and price incentives; the record harvest of 1968 stored in schools and theatres).
• Harish Damodaran, "The Village that Seeded Swaminathan's Green Revolution", Review of Agrarian Studies, 2023 (the Jaunti demonstrations of 1964 on about seventy acres with about fifteen farmers; Hukum Singh's verdict; Subramaniam's approval of 1,000 demonstrations in August 1964; the seed cooperative of November 1965; 18,200 tonnes of Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A on 240,000 hectares in 1966-67).
• The Statesman, "Acharya Balkrishna salutes Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Prime Minister who gave India 'Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan'" (the slogan and its purpose of inspiring farmers to raise output and reduce imports).
• Down To Earth, "Punjab groundwater crisis deepens: 52% over-extraction sparks push for canal irrigation and crop diversification" (extraction of 26.32 billion cubic metres against recharge of 19.14; 111 of 153 blocks over-exploited).