NCERT Solutions for Class 7th Social Science Chapter 13 End-of-chapter exercise — Questions and activities

Because their climate, soil and water are different — and rice and wheat want different things.

What would happen if they swapped?

• Wheat in Kerala would fail. There is no cold season for it to grow in, and the heavy rain would waterlog the field. Wheat cannot stand in water; the roots would rot and fungal diseases would spread. Even if a plant survived, the grain would not fill properly in that heat and humidity.
• Rice in Punjab would grow — but at a heavy price. Punjab does not get Kerala's rain, so every field would have to be flooded from canals and tube wells. That means pumping enormous quantities of groundwater, in a state where “groundwater reserves are fast decreasing”. The crop would be there; the water table would fall.

Because a crop only thrives where all four of its needs are met at once: the right climate, the right soil, enough water at the right time, and suitable terrain. Miss one, and the crop struggles no matter how good the other three are.

India groups these four factors together and calls the result an agroclimatic zone. There are 15 of them, and the categorisation “helps the government and other agencies identify and plan appropriate actions to improve agricultural production — what, when, and how to grow different crops.”

Modern technology has helped in five distinct ways, each named in the chapter.

Scale of the change. Fig. 1.19 is a postage stamp issued to mark the wheat revolution. Its bar graph compares wheat production in 1951 with 1968 — and the 1968 bar towers over the 1951 one, more than twice its height. That single picture is what “self-sufficiency in food” looked like. M.S. Swaminathan, the architect of the Green Revolution, received the Bharat Ratna.

Sustainable agriculture is important because farming has to feed people not only this year, but a century from now — and the methods that produce the most food today are quietly destroying the things that make farming possible at all.

The problem. The Green Revolution made India self-sufficient in food. But “over the last few decades, the limits of the approach and methods of the Green Revolution have become visible”:

• long-term impoverishment of the soil — the very resource that takes a century to several millennia to form;
• depletion of groundwater, which is “fast decreasing” in many parts of India;
• contamination of soil and water by pesticides and fertilisers — “they dissolve and enter water”;
• damage to human and animal health, including the multiplication of cancer cases in rural areas, “as many scientific studies have established”;
• disruption of the ecosystem, “harming important creatures like bees which are so necessary for pollination”.

The answer. Sustainable agriculture keeps the productivity and drops the damage. It is “inspired by Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) and focuses on environment-friendly, long-lasting farming practices” — organic farming with compost, seed cake and animal manure; neem-based pesticides; efficient drip and sprinkler irrigation; crop rotation and multiple cropping; terracing and afforestation to hold the soil.

It is already working. Sikkim banned chemical fertilisers and pesticides in 2014 and became the world's first 100 per cent organic state. The FAO has recognised three Indian systems as globally significant agricultural heritage systems — saffron farming in Kashmir, Odisha's forest-integrated agriculture, and Kerala's below-sea-level farming that combines crop plantation with fishing. ICAR's testing found over 85 per cent of traditional practices scientifically valid.

The challenges the chapter names:

1. Decreasing size of landholding — land is divided among family members over generations; the average is now about three-fourths of a hectare, roughly the size of a football field.
2. Low income — “Farmers with small landholdings are not able to earn much income.”
3. Machines out of reach — tractors and other machines “are designed for larger farms and are expensive to buy or rent”.
4. Climate change — untimely rains, and more frequent severe droughts and heavy rainfall, bringing “a higher risk of crop destruction”.
5. Diversified income no longer enough — rearing cattle, goats and poultry, apiculture, fishing and forest produce once built resilience, but today this “is proving to be inadequate to provide a decent quality of life”.
6. Debt — loans taken in hardship become a debt trap. “As many as 2,300 every day, according to some estimates — have been compelled to abandon agriculture.”
7. Water stress — falling groundwater, and rivers like the Ganga increasingly unable to replenish themselves.

The impact for people — and not only for farmers.

Method. Divide the class into two teams, FOR and AGAINST, and a panel of judges. Each speaker gets two minutes, then two minutes of rebuttal, then one closing speech per side. Judge on evidence used, not on volume. Prepare by listing the methods in each column first.

Points for the FOR team (traditional is better):

• They have already been tested by time. Kallanai still irrigates thousands of hectares after 1,800 years; no modern structure has that record yet.
• They are community-owned. A phad system is run by the farmers themselves, so the water is shared by agreement, not by who can afford the biggest pump.
• They use local materials and local skill — bamboo, earth, stone — so they are cheap to build and easy to repair without a company or a spare part.
• They recharge the ground. Ponds, kunds and khadins let water soak in; a tube well only takes water out.
• They fit the ṛitu chakra — they work with the natural cycle, not against it.

Points for the AGAINST team (modern is better):

• Modern methods are far more water-efficient at the plant. Drip irrigation waters only the roots — “this targeted delivery ensures that water is used efficiently, minimising waste”. Flooding a field cannot match that.
• They work where tradition cannot. Irrigation “enabled farming even in areas with low rainfall”, raised yields and helped “ensure a more stable food supply for the country”.
• They are reliable, and do not depend on a particular landscape — a spring above the field, or a river nearby.
• They can be controlled precisely, with sensors and forecasts, so water is given exactly when the crop needs it.

Method. Do not invent freely. Start from a trend the chapter actually describes and carry it forward about fifty years. Give your essay three parts: what will have changed, why it will have changed, and what you hope stays the same.

What a good essay needs:

• At least three specific developments, each traced back to something in this chapter — hydroponics, drones, drip irrigation, organic farming, climate change, shrinking landholdings, the Green Revolution's after-effects.
• Honesty about the problems as well as the improvements. A future with no problems is not a prediction, it is a wish.
• Your own reasoning: “this will happen because…”
• A closing view of what you personally hope for.

When I am sixty, the year will be about 2080, and I think Indian farming will look different in five ways.

First, water will be the centre of everything. Today the chapter already warns that “groundwater reserves are fast decreasing” and that parts of the Ganga are no longer navigable in summer. By 2080 I think almost no farmer will flood a field. Drip and sprinkler systems will be ordinary, farm ponds will be everywhere, and the water each farm uses will probably be measured, the way electricity is measured now.

Second, farms will be smarter than they are large. The average landholding is already only about three-fourths of a hectare and keeps shrinking. So the machines will shrink to fit — the chapter notes that “of late machines have been designed and invented for small farms too”. I imagine small robots weeding between rows, and drones like the one in Fig. 1.12 checking soil moisture field by field, sending an alert to a phone.

Third, some food will grow without soil at all. Hydroponics is already used “for urban farming and areas with poor soil quality”. In fifty years I expect vegetables to be grown in tall buildings inside cities, close to the people who eat them, so that less food is lost in transport.

Fourth, chemicals will be far less common. Sikkim became the world's first fully organic state in 2014, and ICAR has found over 85 per cent of traditional practices scientifically valid. I think neem-based pesticides, compost, panchagavya and beejamrit will be the normal choice by then, not the unusual one — not out of nostalgia, but because the soil will not survive another fifty years of the alternative.

Fifth, the weather will be harder. This is the part I am least happy about. The chapter says the risk of crop destruction “is likely to get worse as our planet gets rapidly warmer”. So I expect stronger crop insurance, better forecasts, and seeds bred to survive drought and flood — and I expect farmers to grow several crops together, as their ancestors did at Kalibangan in 2800 BCE, because “diversity builds resilience”.

What I hope stays the same. I hope farming is still a respected life, and that the woman who does most of the work is finally called a farmer. I hope villages still keep their own seed. And I hope a child in 2080 can still stand at the edge of a field in November and watch the wheat being sown, exactly as children have done here for four thousand years.

Method. Split into four groups — glaciers and climate, irrigation and groundwater, dams and river flow, and people and pollution. Each group presents the problem it studied, then one solution with its rationale — the reason it would work. Finish with a whole-class discussion of which solutions conflict with each other, because some of them do.

The facts to start from (THINK ABOUT IT, page 26):

• With its rich alluvial soil, the Ganga basin has for millennia fed and watered millions — over 500 million people today.
• For some years the river “has been under stress and is increasingly unable to replenish itself”. Parts of it “are no longer navigable in summer as the water level is too low even for river boats”.
• The causes are multiple: global warming is melting Himalayan glaciers “at an unprecedented rate”; much water is diverted to irrigation; agriculture and industry “pump out huge amounts of groundwater”; and “hundreds of dams interfere with the river's natural flow”.
• The stakes: “if this condition of Ganga persists, agriculture in its basin may become less and less sustainable, threatening the livelihood of millions and India's food production.”

Method. First copy out the crop list from ‘Echoes from the Past' (pages 3–5). Then walk through your own kitchen — the grain bins, the dal jars, the oil tin, the spice box, the fruit basket — and tick every one you find.

The crops that section names:

Conclusions I can draw:

1. Almost every crop on that ancient list is still in my house today. Out of the whole list I found the great majority in daily or seasonal use.
2. Indian farming has been continuous, not broken. These crops were being grown here thousands of years ago — barley and wheat by the Harappans, rice in the Ganga Plain in the 7th–8th millennium BCE — and nobody had to reintroduce them. The knowledge of how to grow, store and cook them was handed down without a gap.
3. Our food is a living historical document. When the Vedas mention yava, godhūma and vrīhi, they are naming the barley, wheat and rice on my own plate.
4. What changed is the method, not the crop. The seed drill became a tractor-drawn drill; the ploughshare pulled by oxen became a tractor. But the crop is the same one our ancestors selected.
5. A few have faded. Castor, linseed, safflower and hemp are rare in ordinary kitchens now — a reminder that a crop can be lost if nobody keeps growing it. That is one reason the chapter cares about seeds preserved “at the community level”.