Did Green Revolution alleviate poverty in rural India? Bastien Alvarez, Lucas Fries and Kamran Niazi April 14, 2014 Abstract India was introduced with excess use of agricultural technology, new irrigation facilities and use of high yielding varieties to boost food production. The phenomenon was coined as the “Green Revolution”. In this paper we use the agricultural and climatic data of the period corresponding to the Green Revolution alongside data for poverty indexes. With both before-after and cross sectional empirical techniques we find that indeed this Green Revolution did affect negatively the poverty indexes both on district and state levels. Introduction In the decade of 1960 India avoided a great famine, yet a minor part of this famine hit the state of Bihar causing deaths of about 2,353 1 . This part famine coupled by war with China in 1962 followed by a war with Pakistan in 1965 caused India to plunge in a food shortage. During this time, the world was seeing revolutionary method to increase production in agriculure. This agricultural revolution was coined as the ‘Green Revolution’ by the USAID. The then prime minister of India in 1967 invited the agronomist Norman Borlaug 2 to try the new high yielding crop varieties (one of the key phenomenon of Green Revolution) in the state of Punjab in India. By the late 1960s (precisely 1967) Green Revolution was officialy announced to have taken place in India. In the following paper we tried to assess the impact of this Green Revolution on the different poverty indexes 3 of India. Intuitively, since the Green Revolution (GR) was able to quadruple India’s grain production (mainly wheat) it should reflect positively on reducing the rural poverty of India aswell. The main challenge we faced was identification of districts with GR and without. A key feature of this GR was the adoption of High Yielding Varieties which were not seen before 1967. After the invitation by the then Prime Minister to try these new varieties in India starting from Punjab, it started appearing in different parts of India. By 1980 all the 13 states observed in our dataset cultivated atleast 20% of their agricultural land using high yielding varieties. As mentioned above the GR techniques were first introduced in Punjab and later these techniques spread in different parts of India. Thus we can safely say that Punjab was the first state to completely adopt GR 4 and there was an across district and state variation in the adoption of these technique. This across district variation helped us derive a discrete measure of GR and we were able to analyse the impact of GR on poverty indexes using a with/without comparison on a cross-sectional data of Indian districts. Furthermore we used a continuous variable 5 and used a Before-After technique to see the impact of 1 Jean Dreze & Amartya Sen (1991) “Hunger and Public Action” 2 accredited as the father of Green Revolution 3 Including poverty gap, mean spending/capita, gini coefficient and head-count ratio 4 this notion we further utilize to set Punjab as the benchmark 5 % of High Yielding Varieties cultivated over total percentage of agricultural land at state-level 1