Opinion MS Swaminathan — the Lord Krishna Indian agriculture lacks today
He was more than just a scientist. There could have been no Green Revolution without Swaminathan
The parallel one can draw is with Verghese Kurien. The Father of the White Revolution certainly understood dairy technology, but the man who provided Amul its technical backbone and invented the world’s first spray-dryer for making powder from buffalo milk was the largely-forgotten H M Dalaya. C R Sasikumar In March 1963, after an invitation was extended to him by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) through the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the American agronomist Norman Borlaug came to Delhi and toured the country’s major wheat-growing areas to study the crop that was in the grain-filling stage prior to harvesting.
He was accompanied by M S Swaminathan, then the head of IARI’s division of botany, and his colleagues, including S P Kohli, M V Rao and V S Mathur. Based on his field observations, Borlaug decided to send about 100 kg seeds each of four semi-dwarf wheat varieties he had bred at Mexico under a Rockefeller Foundation-funded programme — Sonora 63, Sonora 64, Mayo 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A — for testing under Indian conditions.
The seeds arrived in October 1963. Swaminathan — who had first recognised the potential of growing the Mexican varieties and was instrumental in getting Borlaug to India — arranged for their sowing in November, at trial fields in IARI (Delhi) as well as in Ludhiana (Punjab), Pantnagar and Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh), and Pusa (Bihar).
Encouraged by their yield performance at the multi-location trials, Swaminathan, in June 1964, proposed that Borlaug’s varieties be planted in the fields of actual farmers, especially smallholders, in the ensuing 1964-65 rabi season. He sought 1,000 such “national demonstrations” to show that the higher yields had to do with the “new plant type” — less tall varieties with strong stems that responded to high-fertiliser doses and didn’t bend when their ears were heavy with well-filled grains — and not landholding size. C Subramaniam, the then Union minister of agriculture, approved the programme in August, overruling objections of his officials and Planning Commission economists. They were sceptical about the efficacy or even necessity of the semi-dwarf wheats. Left to them, the multi-location trials would have gone on for years just in research fields.
In November 1964, the seeds of Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A were sown by farmers from Delhi’s Jaunti village. They harvested 4-4.5 tonnes of grain per hectare during April-May 1965, as against their average 1-1.5 tonnes from the existing tall varieties. For Swaminathan, it was a vindication of his faith in both the technology and the absorptive capacity of farmers.
In 1965-66 and 1966-67, India suffered back-to-back droughts. As foodgrain production fell to 72-74 million tonnes (mt), from the previous five years’ average of 83 mt, imports soared and touched 10.4 mt in 1966. Swaminathan now pushed for the import of 18,250 tonnes of seeds of the two Mexican varieties. He convinced Subramaniam and also got the then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to agree after inviting him to see the standing crop of the varieties at IARI’s trial fields in March 1965. He simultaneously worked the bureaucracy. His father-in-law S Bhoothalingam being the finance secretary, with the authority to release scarce foreign exchange for the then largest seed shipment in history, definitely helped.
As the imported seeds got planted on a large scale, foodgrain output crossed 95 mt in 1967-68 and 108.5 mt by 1970-71. Wheat production alone more than doubled from 11.4 mt to 23.8 mt between 1966-67 and 1970-71. By this time, Indian scientists – Punjab Agricultural University’s D S Athwal and IARI’s Kohli – had developed their own Kalyansona and Sonalika varieties through selections from segregating populations of other wheat strains (S 227 and S 308) sent by Borlaug. These produced amber-coloured grains with better chapati-making quality than the red kernels from the original Mexican varieties.
The purpose of recounting the above details and the chronology of events is to highlight the central role of Swaminathan. The Green Revolution’s blockbuster wheat varieties were bred by the likes of Athwal, Kohli and Mathur (Arjun, HD 2285 and HD 2329), just as the legendary G S Khush (IR 36 and IR64), V Rama Chandra Rao (Swarna) and M V Reddy (Samba Mahsuri) did for rice.
Swaminathan’s work, as a PhD and post-doctoral researcher at Cambridge and Wisconsin, was primarily in potato genetics and breeding. Yet, he was undoubtedly the master strategist and sutradhar (architect) of India’s Green Revolution. His ability to keep abreast of global agricultural breakthroughs — tracing the Norin-10 dwarfing genes in wheat from Japan and locating Orville Vogel and Borlaug, who had developed varieties incorporating these in the US and Mexico respectively — and building connections with ministers and top officials as much as scientists made him the conductor of the symphony orchestra.
The parallel one can draw is with Verghese Kurien. The father of the White Revolution certainly understood dairy technology, but the man who provided Amul its technical backbone and invented the world’s first spray dryer for making powder from buffalo milk is the largely forgotten H M Dalaya. As Kurien admitted, “my role was in marketing, external affairs and handling politicians, bureaucrats and other establishment people”. Yet, there could have been no Green or White revolutions without Swaminathan and Kurien.
Swaminathan wasn’t only sutradhar; he was also Lord Krishna of Indian agriculture who saw what lay ahead too. As early as January 1968, he flagged the risks of pathogen and pest attacks from mono-cropping (“a single variety…grown in large, contiguous areas”) and “unscientific tapping of underground water (leading to) the rapid exhaustion of this wonderful capital resource left to us through ages of natural farming”.
The Green Revolution relied on breeding varieties enabling farmers to apply more nutrients and water. This “more input, more output strategy” has yielded diminishing returns over time, apart from being environmentally and financially unsustainable. A younger Swaminathan of the 21st century would, perhaps, have focused on technologies for improved nutrient and water use efficiency (“less input, more output”) and breeding for climate change. He would have championed cutting-edge agricultural biotechnology, gene modification and editing research with the same zeal as with the semi-dwarf wheat and rice varieties.
Indian agriculture today lacks champions like Swaminathan and Kurien who could have the ear of the political leadership. They had a strategic vision for the sector that placed the farmer at the centre in their overall scheme of things.
There aren’t many scientists for whom farmers would have observed a bhog and antim ardas funeral service, as was done for Swaminathan at a gurdwara in Punjab earlier this month. For them, he was a Kisanan Da Masiha (a messiah of the farmers). Prime Minister Narendra Modi said pretty much the same, when he called him not a “Krishi Vaigyanik” (agricultural scientist), but a “Kisan Vaigyanik” — a farmers’ scientist.
harish.damodaran@expressindia.com
This article is based on the lecture ‘From Green to Evergreen Revolution: Remembering Dr M S Swaminathan’ delivered by the writer at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
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