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a large negative growth and India faced a serious food problem. Since the share of the agricultural
sector in GDP was still very high at about 50 percent, the slump of agriculture hit the economy as a
whole and even the political regime itself. India was obliged to import as much as 10 million tons of
food (mainly wheat) for the two years (Figure 2).
2000
1500
1000
500
-500
1951
1953
1955
1957
1959
1961
1963
1965
1967
1969
1971
1973
1975
1977
1979
1981
1983
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1987
1989
1991
1993
1995
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2005
0
Population（million)
-1000
Net production of cereals (lakh)
Net export of cereals （10 thousand）
-1500
Year
Figure 2 Population and Cereal Production & Trade in India
2. From the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s
The serious economic and political crisis which India faced in the mid-1960s triggered the big
conversion of agricultural policy of the government; i.e. it emphasized technological innovation and
started to introduce new agricultural technologies from abroad. And it was a fortunate coincidence
for India that the mid-1960s was the time when new seed-fertilizer technologies started to diffuse in
the tropical developing world. In particular, it was luckily found that the wheat HYVs (Mexican
semi-dwarf wheat varieties) developed in CIMMYT in Mexico were quite suitable for the climate
conditions in the northern India such as Punjab１. And the most important factor which promoted the
dissemination of the new technologies was the diffusion of private tube-wells which exploit
groundwater.
Thus the new seed-fertilizer technologies, especially for the wheat crop, started to disseminate
very rapidly in northern India and within a decade or so India attained food self-sufficiency except
for some drought years (Figure 2). It can be called the first „wave‟ of the Green Revolution in India.
However, Indian economy as a whole had to experience a bitter „lost decade‟ during the mid-1960s
to the mid-1970s mainly due to the shortage of foreign exchange for the import-substituting
industrial sectors (Ohno, 1999). It was because India had to continue to import a large amount of