Bharat Ratna for MS Swaminathan: The pioneer of India’s Green Revolution

Before Bharat Ratna, Swaminathan had received India’s second highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan, and the World Food Prize

Updated on: Feb 9, 2024, 14:25:34 IST

By Chetan Chauhan

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Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, popularly known as MS Swaminathan, the pioneer of India’s Green Revolution, was awarded Bharat Ratna on Friday along with two former prime ministers, PV Narsimha Rao and Chaudhary Charan Singh.

Swaminathan started as a young scientist at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in 1959. (PTI file photo)

Swaminathan, who started as a young scientist at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in 1959, collaborated with American agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug to customise high yielding Mexican wheat variety for Indian conditions and launched them in Punjab and Haryana at the time India was reeling under food crisis.

In March 1963, Swaminathan and Borlaug visited fields in norther India during rabi (winter crop season) and tested the soil and new semi-dwarf variety with help of local scientists and farmer bodies.

He got ample support from then union agriculture minister, C Subramanian, and experts of the Planning Commission, which proposed a wide network of irrigation projects to augment British era canals to grow the water intensive crop, and supply of subsidised fertilisers.

At the same time, another breakthrough came when Swaminathan got hold of a fertiliser-responding high-yielding of variety of Indica rice from Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute and improvised it to suit Indian conditions, which made India a large cereal producer capable of exporting its surpluses.

In the next few years, the farmer adopted the new varieties and by early 1970s, the food production in Punjab and Haryana almost increased by 50%, Swaminathan, who died last year at an age of 98, said in his memoir.

With a rise in food production, the demand for machinery increased leading to the government setting up of Hindustan Machine Tools.

As farmer incomes improved, the overall economy also started showing up.

“The first signs of real economic growth became visible because of Green revolution in the late 1970s. For the first time, India’s agriculture production growth rate touched 4%,” said former chief statistician of India, Pranob Sen.

With passage of time, Swaminathan’s green revolution model were replicated in several states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, with huge public investments in irrigation and fertilisers leading to India becoming food surplus by turn of the last century, having a buffer stock for supply of grains under the public distribution system (PDS).

Also Read: At the heart of Swaminathan’s work, dignity of labour, and life, to India’s farmers

However, in the later part of his life, his foundation highlighted the adverse environmental impact of the green revolution polluting ground water, and extensively spoke about climate resilient food crop varieties.

He founded the Swaminathan Foundation in 1988 in Chennai, which researched climate resilient crops with IARI, and some of them were also introduced in Punjab and Haryana. However, takers for these varieties were less.

Rising from the ranks of India’s IARI, Swaminathan, a plant geneticist by training, served as a secretary to the Union department of agricultural research (1972-1979), headed top state-run farm institutions thorughout his career, and was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha (2007-2013).

Time magazine named him one of the 20 most influential people of the 20th century.

He graduated from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University and earned his PhD from Cambridge University in 1952.

He then travelled to the US on the liner Queen Elizabeth for post-doctoral studies in Wisconsin.

Before Bharat Ratna, Swaminathan had received India’s second highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan, and the World Food Prize.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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