Livestock, Fisheries and Agricultural Revolutions

Agriculture in India is not only crops. Animal husbandry, dairying, poultry and fisheries are called the allied sectors, and they matter in exams for three reasons: they employ families who own little or no land, they give a steady income between harvests, and they carry a vocabulary of breeds, institutes and colour-named revolutions that question setters love. This note covers livestock and its breeds, the dairy movement, inland and marine fisheries, and the full list of agricultural revolutions with the product and the person attached to each.

Livestock and animal husbandry

Animal husbandry is the branch of agriculture that deals with the breeding, feeding and care of domestic animals. India counts its animals in the livestock census, which began in 1919 and 1920 and is taken every five years by the department in charge of animal husbandry and dairying. Cattle, buffalo, sheep, goat, pig, horse, camel, poultry and, more recently, stray and pet dogs are enumerated. Indian cattle breeds are grouped as milch breeds such as Sahiwal, Red Sindhi, Gir and Tharparkar, draught breeds such as Hallikar, Amritmahal, Khillari and Kangayam, and dual purpose breeds such as Haryana, Ongole, Kankrej and Rathi. Among buffaloes, Murrah of Haryana is the most valued milk breed, followed by Jaffarabadi and Mehsana of Gujarat, Surti, Nili Ravi of Punjab and Bhadawari of Uttar Pradesh. Goat breeds include Jamunapari and Barbari of Uttar Pradesh, Beetal of Punjab, Black Bengal of the east, Sirohi and Marwari of Rajasthan, and the Changthangi of Ladakh, whose fine undercoat gives pashmina. Sheep breeds include Chokla and Magra of Rajasthan, Lohi and Nali of the north-west, Deccani of the plateau and Nellore of the south. In poultry, White Leghorn and Rhode Island Red are the exotic layers, Aseel is the fighting bird, and Kadaknath of the Jhabua region of Madhya Pradesh, with its black meat, carries a geographical indication.

Dairying and the white revolution

Dairying is the one allied activity that changed rural India through cooperatives. The Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers Union of Anand in Gujarat, known by its brand Amul, was formed in 1946 and became the model called the Anand pattern: a village society collects milk, a district union processes it, and a state federation markets it, so the producer keeps most of the price. The National Dairy Development Board was set up at Anand in 1965 to spread that pattern, and in 1970 it launched Operation Flood, the programme that linked village cooperatives to the milk markets of the big cities and ran in three phases up to 1996. The movement is called the white revolution, and Verghese Kurien, who built Amul and headed the board, is remembered as its father. India has long been the largest producer of milk in the world, and buffalo milk accounts for a large share of it, which is why buffalo breeds are asked so often.

Fisheries, inland and marine

Fisheries are divided into inland and marine. Inland fisheries use rivers, canals, reservoirs, tanks, ponds and brackish backwaters, and most inland output in India comes from aquaculture, the deliberate raising of fish rather than their capture. Marine fisheries work the coast, the continental shelf and the exclusive economic zone, which extends two hundred nautical miles from the coast. Carp such as rohu, catla and mrigal dominate inland farming, while mackerel, sardine, Bombay duck, pomfret, prawn and tuna are the familiar marine catches. A closed season is enforced along both coasts during the monsoon to let fish breed. The spread of induced breeding of carp, developed in India by Hiralal Chaudhuri and his colleagues, made large scale fish farming possible, and the growth of fish output is called the blue revolution. Dedicated institutes serve the sector: the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute at Kochi, the Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute at Barrackpore and the Central Institute of Fisheries Education at Mumbai. The Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana, launched in 2020, is the current umbrella scheme for the sector.

The agricultural revolutions by colour

The green revolution of the middle nineteen sixties is the parent of this family of terms. It brought high yielding dwarf varieties of wheat and rice, assured irrigation, chemical fertiliser and pesticide to selected districts of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, and it rests on the work of Norman Borlaug abroad and M.S. Swaminathan in India. Wheat gained far more than rice, and the gains were concentrated in the irrigated north-west, which is the standard criticism of the programme. The other revolutions are named by the colour of the product.

Terms worth one mark each

• Pisciculture is fish rearing, aquaculture its wider form, and mariculture the farming of marine species.
• Apiculture is bee keeping, sericulture silk rearing, horticulture fruit and vegetable growing, floriculture flowers, olericulture vegetables, viticulture grapes.
• The Anand pattern is the three tier dairy cooperative: village society, district union, state federation.
• The exclusive economic zone of a coastal state reaches two hundred nautical miles from its baseline.