From 1966 Punjab adopted high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties bred from Norman Borlaug's Mexican lines, then high-yielding rice, with assured procurement at a minimum support price, subsidised fertiliser, subsidised power for tubewells, and credit.
Wheat production in Punjab roughly quadrupled within fifteen years. The state, with about one and a half per cent of India's area, came to supply a very large share of the central grain pool. India stopped importing food.
The costs took longer to show. Groundwater in most blocks is now over-exploited. Soil organic carbon has fallen. Fertiliser and pesticide use per hectare is among the highest in India. Paddy is not a crop that belongs in this rainfall and it is grown here because it is procured.
Farm size has fallen with inheritance, debt has risen, and the state records the highest agricultural indebtedness figures in India. The stubble burnt each autumn is a direct consequence of the short window between a paddy harvest and a wheat sowing.
Punjab fed India and was not paid enough to make it sustainable. Both halves of that sentence are true and neither is the whole of the story.
Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana, founded 1962, bred and extended the varieties and is now the institution documenting the consequences.
The dwarf wheats arrived in the mid 1960s, the tubewells and the tractors followed, and Punjab's output rose faster than any comparable region anywhere in the world.
It ended Indian dependence on imported grain within a decade. That is the achievement and it is not in dispute by anybody.
The costs are the water table, the soil, the input debt, the monoculture and the disappearance of everything that was grown before. Punjab paid them and India ate the result, and no arrangement was ever made about that.