Impact of Green Revolution on Industry and Economy of India
Since the crops that used the HYV seeds needed more water, fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides etc, there was a boom in the domestic manufacturing sector also. The industrial growth created new jobs and thus contributed to the economy. Further, the expansion of irrigation necessitated the development of dams and the water stored in them was used to create hydropower. This helped to boost quality of life as well as growth of industrial sector.
The adoption of new technology has also given a boost to agricultural employment because of diverse job opportunities created by multiple cropping and shift towards hired workers. At the same time, there has been displacement of agricultural labour by the extensive use of agricultural machinery.
Green revolution has also strengthened the linkages between agriculture and industry. Even under traditional agriculture, the forward linkage of agriculture with industry was always strong, since agriculture supplied many of the inputs of industry; but backward linkage of agriculture to industry – the former using the finished products of the latter was weak. Now, however, agricultural modernisation has created a larger demand for inputs produced and supplied by industries to agriculture and thus the backward linkage has also become quite strong. In this way, the linkage between agriculture and industry has got strengthened.
The new agricultural technology has made the farmer market-oriented. The farmers are largely dependent on the market for the supply of inputs and for the demand for their output. At the same time, the demand for agricultural credit has also increased as the new technology has increased the cash requirements of the farmer. Besides, modern technology has definitely proved its superiority over the traditional technology only in those areas where appropriate conditions prevail. But as mentioned above, these conditions prevail only in certain selected areas and the rest ofthe country is not yet suitable for advanced technology. What is, therefore, wanted is the evolution of a low-cost technology which can be adopted by all small farmers and which can use and exploit the local resources. [currentuser_id]