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Indian food philosophy11 is generally seen divided into three phases with their own objectives and challenges:
This phase continued for the first three decades after Independence. The main aim and the struggle of this phase was producing as much foodgrains as required by the Indian population, i.e., achieving physical access to food.
The idea of the Green Revolution at the end of this phase at least gave India the confidence of realising the objective. At the end of the 1980s, India was a self-sufficient country with regard to food.
Meanwhile India was celebrating its success of the first phase, a new challenge confronted the country—achieving economic access to food. The situation went on worsening and by early 2000 there was a paradoxical situation in the country when it was having more than three times buffer stocks of foodgrains in the central pool, but in several states people were dying due to lack of food—a complete mockery of the logic behind
maintaining buffer stock, success of green revolution and the concept of India being a welfare state.12 The Supreme Court intervened after a PIL was filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and a national level Food for Work Programme came up (to be merged with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme). The courts took the governments on task if foodgrains rot either in godowns or destroyed in oceans to manage market price for the foodgrains, or if the Centre had to go for exporting wheat at very low price. In this process India emerged as the seventh largest exporter of wheat (2002). Basically, we were exporting the share of wheat which was not consumed by many Indians due to lack of economic reach to food.
As the inputs of the Green Revolution were costlier, its output naturally were to be costlier. To fight the situation there should have been a time- bound and target-oriented macro-economic policy support, which could deliver comparative increase in the purchasing capacity of the masses to make food affordable for them. India badly failed in it. The crisis was managed by throwing higher and higher subsidies ultimately affecting government expenditure on the infrastructural shortcomings in the agriculture sector. Even after providing higher food subsidies, some people failed to purchase food and they were left with no option but to die of hunger.
India is still in this phase and trying to solve the crisis through twin approach, firstly, by creating maximum number of gainful employment, and secondly, by cutting cost of foodgrains (via the second green revolution based on biotechnology).
It must be kept in mind that the food self-sufficiency happiness was a temporary thing for India. By the mid 1990s, India realised that its foodgrain production was lagging behind its population increase. It means India is still fighting to achieve physical reach to the required level of food.
By the end of the 1980s, world experts started questioning the very way world was carrying on with different modes of production. Agricultural activitiy was one among them which had become hugely based on industries (chemical fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, etc.). All developed economies had
declared their agriculture to be an industry.13
It was time to look back and introspect. By the early 1990s, several countries started going for ecologically friendly methods and techniques of industrial, agricultural and services sectors development. The much-hyped Green Revolution was declared ecologically untenable and the world headed for organic farming, green farming, etc.
It meant that achieving physical and economic reach to food was not the only challenge India was facing, but such aims should not be realised at the cost of the precious ecology and biodiversity—a new challenge. India needed a new kind of green revolution which could deliver it the physical, economic as well as ecological access to food—the Second Green Revolution—an all- in-one approach towards the agriculture sector.