Conceptual Framework of Second Green Revolution

The first green revolution ran out of steam mainly because it was focussed only on grain production; it did not help the dryland farming and it was not scale neutral and thus helped only large farmers. The call for second green revolution focuses on these issues by adopting a different strategy to follow. In context with our country, the second green revolution has been called for in Eastern States via the BGREI programme in recent years. However, Second Green Revolution currently remains as a concept only. It has not translated into a reality so far.

The conceptual framework of second green revolution is based the below premises:

• Attaining food security and sustainable farm profitability by embracing the entire agro-economy from the farmer to consumer.
• Harness the bouquet of new technologies such as Information Technology, Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Genetic Engineering, water efficient irrigation systems; environment friendly pesticides, precision agriculture/farming organic farming, biodynamic farming .
• It will focus not only on traditional farming but also on commercial farming and would promote horticulture, floriculture, sericulture, aquaculture, plantation crops, medicinal crops, aromatic crops, spices, etc.
• It keeps into view the local geographical and climatic position, soil fertility and productivity and nature, water, human resource and infrastructure availability and cost of production.
• It is expected to be careful towards prospective yields of supply price or cost of production of these crops so that productivity and production is fastly increased on minimum costs of production and minimum water as ‘more crop with per drop’ and fanners whether big or small or marginal can take benefit from this.
• Massive crop diversification and multiple cropping is one of the key features of second green revolution.
• It aims for achieving self-sufficiency in pulses and oilseeds and doubling horticulture and floriculture would be doubled in five years.
• It also results in the forward and backward linkages and embraces an ecosystem of food production, food processing and marketing.