A new crop

In the next few weeks, the central government’s entire food and agriculture machinery will be headed by new incumbents. It appears to be a straightforward coincidence, but officials in the ministry said that it has seldom happened that all the three main officers in the major ministry retire in such short span of time. These three are Agriculture Secretary P K Basu, Food Secretary B C Gupta, and Animal Husbandry Secretary Surya Gangadharan. While Messrs Basu and Gupta will retire at the end of May, Mr Gangadharan will leave office next month. Mr Gupta’s tenure as food secretary was dominated by the debates over the UPA’s controversial Food Security Bill. Mr Basu in agriculture is generally assigned a great deal of the credit for the extension of the productivity gains of the Green Revolution to eastern India.