The rapid rise in Indian cereal output from the mid-1960s, driven by high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice combined with irrigation, chemical fertilisers, assured prices and institutional credit, which ended India's dependence on food imports.
In the early 1960s India was importing large amounts of wheat under the United States PL-480 programme, and two successive droughts in 1965 and 1966 brought the country close to famine. Dependence on foreign food aid was seen as a threat to sovereignty, especially when supplies were used as diplomatic pressure.
Agricultural scientists had already been testing semi-dwarf wheat varieties developed in Mexico by Norman Borlaug, which did not fall over when given heavy doses of fertiliser and water. Under Agriculture Minister C. Subramaniam and with scientific leadership from M. S. Swaminathan, India imported large quantities of this seed in 1966 and spread it rapidly in irrigated areas. The government simultaneously set up the Food Corporation of India and the Agricultural Prices Commission in 1965 to buy grain at announced prices and store it. Within a few years wheat production in the north-west roughly doubled. The term "Green Revolution" itself was coined in 1968 by William Gaud of the US Agency for International Development to describe similar changes across Asia.
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