Essay · Section B28 September 2026

What uniformity gains in yield, it loses in resilience.

In 1845 a mould arrived in Ireland. Phytophthora infestans turned potatoes into black slime in the ground, and it spread so fast because much of the country depended on one crop and largely on one variety, the Lumper. The Lumper had been chosen for good reasons: it gave heavy yields on poor soil. It also had no defence against the blight. About a million people died over the next few years and about as many emigrated. Nothing about the Lumper was bad except its success. It had become so common that one pathogen could strike the whole country at once.

Uttar Pradesh has just lived through a smaller version of the same story. Co-0238, a sugarcane variety released by the Sugarcane Breeding Institute at Coimbatore in 2009, gave high yields and high sugar recovery and made the State India’s largest sugar producer. Mills and farmers planted it across most of their cane area. Then the red rot fungus evolved a form that broke its resistance, and the State’s sugar output fell from 126.4 lakh tonnes in 2019–20 to 89.5 lakh tonnes in 2025–26. A new variety, Co-20016, has now been cleared. This essay argues that uniformity always sells the same bargain: efficiency today in exchange for fragility tomorrow. Standards are indispensable, but the wisdom lies in knowing where to standardise and where to protect variety.

The pattern runs through the history of agriculture. Ceylon was a great coffee exporter until coffee leaf rust appeared in 1869 and destroyed its plantations within two decades; the island turned to tea. The Gros Michel banana, which filled Western markets in the early twentieth century, was wiped out commercially by Panama disease in the 1950s. Its replacement, the Cavendish, is now threatened by a new strain of the same fungus. In 1970 a leaf blight destroyed roughly 15 per cent of the American maize crop because most hybrid maize shared a single cytoplasm that made it vulnerable. In each case, a crop was selected for yield and then planted so widely that it became a single target.

The same logic appears wherever systems are simplified for output. James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State (1998), describes how eighteenth-century German foresters replaced mixed woods with neat rows of Norway spruce that were easy to count, tax and harvest. The first rotation was excellent. The second and third brought soil decline and pest outbreaks, and foresters coined a word, Waldsterben, for forest death. Finance learned the same lesson in 2008. Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England observed in 2009 that banks had come to hold similar assets and follow similar models, so that one shock hit all of them together, much as a disease moves through a monoculture. A system in which everyone is equally efficient can also be a system in which everyone fails together.

Literature saw the human version first. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), the World State’s motto is “Community, Identity, Stability”. People are produced in standard batches, and the society is productive, peaceful and unable to imagine anything different. Biology gives the reason diversity matters. A population whose members differ carries, somewhere within it, the variation that may survive the next disease, drought or predator. Nikolai Vavilov understood this when he built a great collection of seeds at the Institute of Plant Industry in Leningrad. During the siege of the city in the Second World War, several of its scientists starved to death rather than eat the seeds they were guarding. They understood that a seed bank is an insurance policy against a future nobody can predict.

The case for uniformity is strong and should be stated plainly. Uniformity fed India. The high-yielding dwarf wheats that Norman Borlaug and Indian scientists brought to Punjab in the mid-1960s roughly doubled India’s wheat harvest within a few years and ended the humiliation of food aid under the American PL-480 programme. Borlaug himself, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, called the green revolution a “temporary success” that had given mankind “a breathing space”. Uniformity also makes a nation possible in simpler ways. Britain’s railways adopted a single standard time in the 1840s so that timetables could be kept across the country. India adopted Indian Standard Time in 1906, though Bombay kept its own time until 1955. Project Unigauge, begun in 1992, converted railway lines to a single gauge so that goods need not be unloaded at every break of gauge. From February 2027 the atomic clocks of the National Physical Laboratory will provide India’s only legal time. Nobody wants a diversity of clocks, weights or voltages.

Yet even these examples teach restraint. The Green Revolution’s narrow rice–wheat rotation in Punjab has drained groundwater so badly that the State passed a law in 2009 to delay paddy transplanting. The strength of a single legal time depends on having more than one way to deliver it, so that a failure in one satellite or cable does not stop banks and power grids. The lesson is not that uniformity is wrong. It is that uniformity is safe only when it is chosen deliberately and backed by something different.

The resolution lies in a distinction. Standardise the interfaces; diversify the substance. A common time, a common gauge, a common payments protocol and a common Constitution are the platforms on which variety can flourish safely. Seeds, crops, languages, institutions and ideas are different. They are the places where variety is itself the protection. For agriculture this means varietal replacement plans, so that no cane or wheat variety covers most of a region for too long, together with seed banks and mixed cropping. Millets and pulses, which resist drought better, matter more in a year when the monsoon is nearly 12 per cent below normal. For the State it means federalism and local experiment rather than one design everywhere. For culture it means what UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) says: cultural diversity is “as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature”.

India has always understood this better than its planners sometimes remember. Its unity was never meant to be uniformity, and the Constitution’s framers accepted many languages, legal regimes and schedules because a single template would have broken the country. The Lumper and Co-0238 were not failures of science. They were failures of forgetting that a harvest is also a bet on the future. Uniformity is useful for the next season. Resilience depends on keeping enough variety for the future, when conditions change and a single approach may fail.