Green Revolution’s Impact on India’s Farm Size and Productivity Growth

The Green Revolution in India, beginning in the mid-1960s, was a period of rapid agricultural transformation driven by the adoption of high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice, expanded irrigation, increased use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and growing mechanisation. These changes dramatically raised crop yields, particularly in wheat and rice, and helped India move from chronic food shortages and dependence on grain imports to near self-sufficiency by the 1970s.

Productivity gains were initially concentrated in regions with good irrigation and infrastructure, such as Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh, leading to uneven regional outcomes. While the Green Revolution significantly increased aggregate food production and rural incomes, it also generated new challenges. One such challenge concerns its impact on farm size and productivity. Interesting new research sheds valuable light on this challenge. 

Key Question
We would like to know how the relationship between farm size and productivity evolved in India, potentially because of the rapid technological change introduced by the Green Revolution. To see why this question is worth researching, note that a long-standing, stylised result in development economics is the “inverse farm size–productivity result.” Simply put, this result tells us that smaller farms produce more output per unit of land than larger ones. More recent evidence from India, however, suggests a U-shaped pattern. In other words, productivity is highest on very small farms, declines for medium-sized farms, and rises again for the largest farms. 

The research under discussion uses a unique household-level panel dataset, ARIS–REDS, which tracks roughly 5,000 Indian farm households across three survey waves in 1971, 1982, and 1999. This panel spans the core decades of the Green Revolution and is notable for oversampling large farms, thereby allowing for credible analysis across the full farm size distribution. These data are merged with district-level information from the Village Dynamics in South Asia (VDSA) dataset, which provides measures of HYV adoption, mechanisation, irrigation, and fertiliser use. Productivity is measured primarily as revenue per acre, with profit per acre used as a complementary metric.

Key Findings
The research shows how the farm size–productivity and size–profitability relationships evolved over time. In 1971 and 1982, the relationship was strongly and approximately linearly inverse. This means that smaller farms earned higher revenue and profits per acre than larger farms. However, by 1999, this relationship became non-linear. While small farms continued to outperform medium-sized farms, the largest farms experienced a rebound in both productivity and profitability, thereby resulting in a clear U-shaped pattern. The lowest point on this U-shaped curve occurred around two hectares, meaning that farms of intermediate size performed worst on a per-acre basis.

Did Green Revolution drive this change from 1971 and 1982 to 1999? To answer this query, the research exploited variation in the rollout of HYVs across districts within the same state and year. By using specific econometric techniques, the research isolated the plausibly exogenous within-state differences when exposed to Green Revolution technologies. The results strongly suggest that districts with greater HYV prevalence exhibit a more pronounced U-shaped relationship between farm size and productivity. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that HYV adoption and associated technological changes altered the returns to scale in agriculture.

Driving Forces
There are two issues to resolve here. First, what mechanisms explain why large farms became more productive over time? The analysis demonstrates that as HYVs spread, large farms increased their use of hired labour and accumulated substantially more mechanised and irrigation assets relative to medium-sized farms. This suggests that the Green Revolution encouraged a kind of “professionalisation” of agriculture among large landholders, enabling them to exploit economies of scale that were previously unavailable in a labor-intensive production environment.

Second, did the Green Revolution have an impact on farm size over time? To answer this question, the research under discussion analysed whether initially small or marginal farms were more likely to grow into larger size categories in areas with greater HYV exposure. There is little evidence that small farms (1–2 hectares) are more likely to become medium or large farms. We also see that marginal farms (less than 1 hectare) are less likely to grow into medium-sized farms in districts with higher HYV adoption. The salient takeaway is that although the Green Revolution raised aggregate productivity and benefited large farms, it may have created new barriers to upward mobility for the smallest farmers.

Key Takeaways
This research is worth paying attention to because it demonstrates that India’s contemporary U-shaped farm size–productivity relationship was not always present but emerged during the Green Revolution. We learn that technological change can fundamentally reshape the structure of agricultural productivity, thereby benefiting both very small and very large farms while disadvantaging those in the middle. 

From a policy perspective, while sustaining smallholder productivity is salient, targeted interventions may be needed to reduce the disadvantages faced by medium-sized farms and to prevent the smallest farms from being trapped at the bottom of the size distribution.

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