From the Green Revolution to the 'Cancer Express' — Chemical Poisoning and Sinking Aquifers

Every night at exactly 9:25 pm, a train departs from Bathinda railway station in Punjab for Bikaner in Rajasthan. In the official railway timetable, this train is numbered 14720.

Yet across the villages of Punjab and Haryana, no one knows this train by its official number. People call it by a terrifying and heart-wrenching name—the ‘Cancer Express’!

The twelve coaches of this train do not carry ordinary passengers; 70 to 80 per cent of its travellers are impoverished farmers battling cancer, their elderly mothers, and young children, journeying to the government cancer hospital in Bikaner for chemotherapy and radiation. The compartments of the train are filled with the sobs of tears, groans of unbearable pain, and the pungent stench of medicines.

Now, look back for just a moment.

Punjab and Haryana are the very states hailed in the 1960s as the cradle of the ‘Green Revolution’! They were the ones that produced record-breaking harvests of wheat and paddy in their fields to feed the entire nation.

Why then are the sons and daughters of the very land that saved India from starvation dying of cancer in household after household today?

In Chapter 7 (‘Indian Farmers and Villages: Heading Towards Ruin’) of his seminal book ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’ (Ruined Farming, Ruined Villages), N. Singh presents a ruthless scientific post-mortem of this chemical devastation and modern, indiscriminate, consumerist agriculture.

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The Dark Side of the Green Revolution: Three Fatal Crises

1. The Indiscriminate Use of Urea and DAP:
   • The high-yielding varieties (HYV Seeds) introduced in the 1960s had an insatiable appetite for chemicals. Governments provided heavy subsidies on chemical fertilisers.
   • The consequence has been that where barely 10 kg of fertiliser per acre was once applied, 200 to 300 kg of urea and DAP are being pumped into the soil today. The soil’s natural earthworms and beneficial microbes have perished; the organic carbon content of the soil has plummeted from 1% to 0.2%—meaning our soil has become chemically ‘dead’!
2. A Cocktail of Pesticides and the Spread of Cancer:
   • Hazardous pesticides sprayed on cotton and paddy crops (such as endosulfan, malathion, and glyphosate) have leached through the soil into the groundwater. Groundwater tests across the Malwa region have revealed levels of uranium, lead, arsenic, and nitrates up to 50 times higher than safe limits. Traces of pesticides are now being detected even in mothers’ breast milk!
3. Plummeting Groundwater Levels (Groundwater Depletion):
   • When the cultivation of paddy (a water-guzzling crop) was forcibly imposed on semi-arid regions with low rainfall like Punjab and Haryana, farmers tore into the bowels of the earth to sink lakhs of tube-wells. Today, the water table has plunged from 100 feet to abyss-like depths of 500 to 600 feet. NASA satellite imagery has warned that this fertile region could turn into a desert within the next 15 years!

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Traditional Natural Farming versus Indiscriminate Chemical Farming

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The Bitter Truth from the Book: N. Singh’s Poignant Warning

The author N. Singh writes in Chapter 7 of his book ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’:

“In our greed to grow more food, we have poured so much slow poison of urea and pesticides into the veins of our sacred Mother Earth that today our soil is diseased, our groundwater is toxic, and the food served on our plates is slowly pushing us into the jaws of death. Bathinda’s ‘Cancer Express’ is not merely Punjab’s tragedy; it is the terrifying future awaiting the whole of India! Multinational seed and pesticide corporations, in pursuit of their profits, have turned our farmers into the killers of their own land. The one who was the annadata [provider of food] has today been forced to become a dispenser of poison. If we do not immediately return to natural farming and water conservation, our coming generations will beg not for a grain of food, but for a sip of clean water and cancer medicines!”
— N. Singh (Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon, pp. 162-163)

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Four Epoch-Making Solutions to Avert Catastrophe

1. A National Mission for Zero Budget Natural Farming: Free farmers from chemical fertilisers and provide a direct incentive subsidy of ₹10,000 per acre for natural farming based on indigenous cow dung and urine formulations—jeevamrit [fermented liquid bio-fertiliser], ghanjeevamrit [solidified bio-fertiliser], and mulching.
2. Liberation from the Vicious Cycle of Paddy and Wheat (Crop Diversification): Low water-consuming, nutritious crops—such as bajra [pearl millet], jowar [sorghum], ragi [finger millet], pulses, and oilseeds—must be granted MSP on par with paddy alongside assured government procurement, so that farmers reduce the acreage under paddy.
3. A Total Ban on Lethal Pesticides: An immediate and complete ban must be imposed in India on the manufacture and sale of more than 27 lethal chemical pesticides that are already outlawed across Europe and the United States.
4. Mandatory Water Conservation and Micro-Irrigation (Drip/Sprinkler): Canal irrigation must be revived, and water metering and 100% drip irrigation must be made compulsory for large tube-wells extracting groundwater.

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A Question for Reflection (The Message of the Book)

Is such a ‘Green Revolution’ of any worth if it fills our plates with grain, yet infuses the bodies of our children with the poison of cancer and premature death?

To understand this mortal crisis of chemical agriculture, the destruction of the environment, and the scientific pathway back to natural farming, this seventh chapter of N. Singh’s acclaimed book ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’ ought to be read by every citizen and farmer.