FOOD security for all Indians is a mirage. Population growth has outstripped agricultural growth. Production in the heartland of Green Revolution reached a plateau in the early 1990s and has been decelerating with easing of restrictions to international commodities trade.

In times when the country’s food basket is shrinking, the dry lands that constitute about two-thirds of cultivated land could have helped. But we forgot them when with Borlaug-lent, Swaminathan-developed dwarf varieties productivity ballooned in well-irrigated Punjab, Haryana and west UP–wheat from 1242 to 2598 kg/hectare, rice from 1089 to 1898 between 1967 and 1995. We let farmers mindlessly inject chemicals–fertilisers, pesticides, weedicides–into the soil in these states. Now we do need to take agricultural research and extension to the dry lands for a quantum raise in farm output.