The Downstream Effects of India’s Green Revolution

Republish

India extracts more groundwater than any other country worldwide, even more than the U.S. and China combined. In 2024, the country drew nearly 65 trillion gallons of water from its aquifers. A major driver of this demand is agriculture, especially in the northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana.

The origins of this thirst can be traced back to the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Battling persistent food shortages and dependence on grain imports, Indian planners hoped to attain self-sufficiency in food production. They provided farmers with high-yielding seed varieties, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, and also helped mechanize farming tools and equipment.

In Punjab, one of the program’s focus areas, farmers were encouraged to move away from their traditional crops such as pulses, maize, and oilseeds to rice and wheat. As a result, the area under wheat cultivation more than doubled between 1960 and 2023, with production rising more than nine-fold. Rice cultivation saw even steeper increases, with land use increasing nearly 14-fold and an astonishing 58 times more production of the grain.

Representatives from several farmer organizations partake in a prayer ceremony in Jalandhar, Punjab, for M.S. Swaminathan, the architect of India’s Green Revolution, who passed away in 2023. Government policies born from this program encouraged farmers to move away from their traditional crops in favor of growing wheat and rice.

Rice requires a lot of water — between around 350 and 600 gallons for every pound of grain produced. Farmers initially relied on canals for water, but they soon began drilling tube wells — pipes bored deep underground — to tap into aquifers. The number of tube wells in Punjab increased from 200,000 in 1970 to more than 1.5 million today, said Samanpreet Kaur, a groundwater expert at the Punjab Agricultural University. Eighty-six percent of Punjab’s available water resources are now being used for agriculture and 75 percent for paddy, or rice plants, alone.

According to a report from the Central Ground Water Board, a governmental scientific body, water levels in Punjab are dropping at an average of almost 20 inches per year. The tube wells used to be located at 100 to 150 feet. “Now they have reached up to 400 to 500 feet,” said Sunil Mittal, a soil and groundwater expert at the Central University of Punjab. He explained farmers are now hitting aquifers surrounded by minerals such as uranium, lead, and arsenic, which are entering the water used for both agriculture and household consumption. These heavy metals, along with nitrates in fertilizer runoff, may have contributed to increasing rates of cancers.

Mittal warned that restoring the quality of groundwater will be a difficult task — one that has no strategy in place yet. The contamination has happened over 50 years and it will take just as long to clean it up, he said. “I don’t think any artificial clean up technology will work at such a large level.”


Harwant Singh, a farmer in Gehri Devi Nagar, Punjab, checks his phone as he waters his wheat crop at night in January 2024. Of the state’s 150 administrative sub-units, 117 are currently drawing more water than is being replenished, said groundwater expert Samanpreet Kaur, resulting in a net loss of groundwater.
A worker harvests cotton on a farm in Thuthianwali, Punjab, in November 2017. Repeated insect infestations within the crop in the last few years forced many farmers to switch to rice, which has added to the stress on water levels.
Anmol Sah, a migrant worker from Purnia in the eastern state of Bihar, transplants paddy saplings in a field in Bhaini Bagha, Punjab, in July 2023. He is a part of a group of 13 workers that has a contract to transplant paddy on 50 acres.
Farm worker Buta Singh washes his hands after spraying a cocktail of fungicide, insecticide, and nutrient supplements to improve paddy yield in the Mansa district, Punjab, in September 2023. The district received 45 percent less rainfall than average during the monsoon season, which resulted in the underdevelopment of crops and lower yields.
Rayandeep Singh sets paddy stubble on fire as he prepares to sow the winter wheat crop in Bhaini Bagha, Punjab, in November 2017.
Farmers mix herbicides with water in their knapsack sprayers at a farm in Dhaula, Punjab, in December 2019.
A farmer sleeps atop his rice harvest at the grain market in Bathinda, Punjab, in November 2023.
Sohan Das owns 28 acres of land in Hathan, Punjab, on which he grows rice and wheat. The village does not have access to canal water and the farmers here are dependent on tube wells for irrigation. “This is sheer wastage of water,” Das said of growing rice in October 2023. But he continues because he receives an assured price for his crop.
The Bhakra Canal at Khanauri, Punjab, in January 2024. The canal carries water from the Bhakra dam, built on the Sutlej River, to irrigate about 10 million acres in the states of Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan. “Bhakra, the new temple of resurgent India, is the symbol of India’s progress,” said Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, at the dam’s inauguration in 1963.
Mitthu Singh lights a lamp by a canal on the night of the Sikh holiday of Bandi Chhor Divas, which coincides with Diwali, in Bhagi Bandar, Punjab, in 2023. The canal brings water to the fields, a farmer accompanying him said, describing the canal as “just as sacred as Gurdwara,” a Sikh place of worship.
Water gushes out of a freshly installed tube well in Burj Mehma, Punjab, in April 2024. Vikramjeet Singh, the farmer, lost his cotton crop in the fall to a pest attack and the winter wheat crop to an unprecedented hailstorm in early March. He hopes the new well will help him switch from cotton to rice in fall.
Farmers work on plugging a breach in a canal, which flooded about 200 acres of farmland with standing crops in Bhamme Kalan, Punjab, in November 2017.
Sukhdev Singh, an employee of the Food Corporation of India, inspects the stocks of milled rice at a warehouse in Mehma Bhagwana, Punjab, in January 2024. The rice and wheat stored here are routed to the Public Distribution System program, which provides free and subsidized food grains to those in need across India. Though Punjab constitutes only about 1.5 percent of India’s land mass, grains from the state in recent years have made up substantial portions of this central pool. In the 2023-2024 production year, rice from Punjab was 25 percent of government procurement from farmers for the program; the state also contributed nearly 50 percent of the wheat.
A cancer patient from Punjab aboard the train from Bathinda to Bikaner in November 2016. For several years, cancer patients from southern Punjab travelled to the neighboring state of Rajasthan for treatment, and this overnight train was infamously known as the Cancer Express. The number of passengers has now reduced after multiple public hospitals were established to deal with cancers, but many patients continue to take the train.
Bimla Devi, pictured here in October 2023, is a cancer survivor from the village of Phulad in Punjab. She believes that pollution in the water caused her stomach cancer. On Google maps, someone added a placemark on the Ghaggar River, which flows past the village, that reads “Cancer River.”
A cancer screening camp in Cheema, Punjab organized by Homi Bhabha Cancer Hospital, in October 2023. Cancers are widely reported across the state, especially in the south, and many farmers believe it is the chemicals from the fields that are causing them.
Staff from a privately run reverse osmosis-based water plant deliver water to a home in Deon, Punjab, in May 2024. Groundwater in most villages in the south of Punjab is unfit for human consumption owing to the significant presence of heavy metals, fertilizers, and pesticide runoffs from fields. Villagers now either buy water from private water purification plants or fetch it from plants installed by the government.
On Feb. 13, 2024, hundreds of farmers set off to Delhi, demanding a legal guarantee for the minimum support price — set by the India’s government — on all crops. This, they argue, will help them move away from the rice and wheat cycle to other crops. However, police and paramilitary troops stopped them at the state of Haryana’s border, and they have remained at the borders ever since. Pictured here in May 2024, Ram Singh, a farmer from Khemuana, occupies a protest site at Punjab’s border.

Reporting on this project between 2023 and 2024 was supported by a grant from the National Geographic Society.

Harsha Vadlamani is an independent photojournalist whose work focuses on rural and indigenous communities across India. His work has also been published by National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, Scientific American, GEO and Al Jazeera, among other publications.