He was the face of the Green Revolution
MS Swaminathan's passing is a loss for India's agricultural science, but his legacy will continue to inspire future generations of scientists
In an extraordinary gesture, Norman Borlaug was to comment when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970: “To you, Dr Swaminathan, a great deal of credit must go for first recognising the value of Mexican dwarfs (wheat seedlings). Had this not occurred, it is quite possible that there would not have been a Green Revolution in Asia.” And when Norman Borlaug passed away in 2009, Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, or MS Swaminathan, titled his obituary as “A Great Scientist and Humanist”. As I sat down to write an obituary for Swaminathan, I could not think of a better way of describing him. Swaminathan was the preeminent agricultural scientist of the developing world, a staunch humanist, and a citizen deeply committed to the values of secularism.
When Swaminathan returned to India from Cambridge in 1952, with a PhD in genetics, he found himself at the centre of a historic effort of building a National Agricultural Research System (NARS). Raising food production was critical for feeding India’s rising population and the success of planning. But India was importing close to three million tonnes of food grains in 1949-50, spending ₹150 crore at current prices. This was the context in which the need to raise production through a rise in yields was recognised as important.
After he joined the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi in 1954, Swaminathan was involved in developing new rice and wheat varieties that were not just high-yielding, but also short-statured and fertiliser-responsive. His team brought over the Norin-10 wheat varieties of Japanese origin, under Borlaug’s guidance, crossed them with Indian wheat varieties and produced the popular short-statured wheat varieties of the early Green Revolution period: Kalyan Sona, Sonalika, Safed Lerma, and Chhoti Lerma. Many of these varieties could potentially yield 6-8 tonnes/ha.
Similarly, in rice, Swaminathan and his team brought over prototypes of the Chinese dwarf variety Dee-geo-Woo-gen from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Manila. They crossed these with tall indica varieties in India and developed the popular short-stemmed varieties: Jaya and Padma, followed by Hamsa, Krishna, Cauvery, Bala, Ratna, Vijaya CO-34, Jamuna, Sabarmati, Pankaj, Jagannath and so on. Some of these varieties had a potential yield of 8 tonnes/ha. Later, with other eminent scientists like EA Siddiq and VP Singh, Swaminathan developed popular basmati rice varieties — culminating in the Pusa Basmati variety in 1989, which was the world’s first semi-dwarf, high yielding basmati variety.
The developments in rice and wheat dramatically transformed India’s agriculture. The key success was that food production could be raised without bringing fresh areas into cultivation. Without fresh land, a significant rise in yields was required to even keep the per capita food availability constant. To illustrate this imperative, Swaminathan once invoked the Red Queen’s race in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass”, where the Red Queen told Alice: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
This was the Green Revolution’s biggest success. Swaminathan was to write that in the new “age of algeny”, India could achieve a “genetic destruction of yield barriers” and gain for itself much-needed “political sovereignty”. Western powers could no longer threaten India with any blockade of food aid if India refused to toe their line on foreign or economic affairs.
Swaminathan agreed with the Left’s criticisms that if the Green Revolution had been preceded by or accompanied by land reforms, its impacts would have been far greater, and its outcomes more egalitarian. Hence, he always cited “unfinished land reforms” as a key challenge faced by Indian agriculture. Swaminathan also rued the fact that despite achieving self-sufficiency in production, India failed in the equitable distribution of food and ending mass hunger and malnourishment. Hence, he was a consistent votary of universal food distribution and the “right to food” of every citizen.
In 1982, Swaminathan was appointed as the director of IRRI. Under his leadership, more than 132,000 accessions from the world’s 150,000 types of rice seedlings were collected and stored in IRRI’s International Rice Germplasm Centre. He faced criticisms on this count – including of the outrageous “gene robbery” variety — but his position was clear and unflinching: “The loss of every gene limits our options for the future”. In fact, no rice variety was ever “stolen”; IRRI’s gene banks stored only the duplicates of germplasms. When years of war had destroyed many traditional rice varieties in countries like Cambodia, its farmers could rely on IRRI’s gene bank and retrieve the seeds for cultivation. In the absence of the gene bank, many such varieties may have just gone extinct.
After retirement, he established the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai. The MSSRF has been doing pioneering work around not just basic agricultural science but also action research in the fields of biodiversity, nutrition, gender, and the climate crisis.
Between 2004 and 2006, Swaminathan headed the National Commission for Farmers (NCF). The five reports of the NCF contain insightful analyses of Indian agriculture. In these reports, Swaminathan suggested a radical idea: Minimum Support Prices must be fixed 50% higher than the C2 cost of production. This “Swaminathan formula”, as it is called, is a rallying point in the agitational movements of the Indian farmers today.
Swaminathan was also a lifelong comrade of farmer’s movements. He stood in solidarity with the historic agitation against the three farm laws in 2020-21 and expressed happiness when the laws were withdrawn.
With Swaminathan’s passing away, India’s agricultural science has lost a leading light. But let us hope that Swaminathan’s legacy will ignite the minds of the new generation of scientists to view the resolution of national problems — particularly of deprivation and inequality — as abiding professional goals. That would be our fitting tribute to him.
R Ramakumar is professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. The views expressed are personal