Opinion MS Swaminathan’s evergreen revolution: Productivity without ecological harm

Swaminathan had, in late-1954, joined the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) at New Delhi as an assistant cytogeneticist. This was after a PhD from Cambridge University, UK and a two-year postdoctoral stint at Wisconsin, US, where he worked on potato genetics and breeding of frost- and disease-resistant varieties.

At IARI’s Botany Division, which he was to later rename as Division of Genetics, Swaminathan’s focus shifted to wheat. He was convinced of the need for breeding semi-dwarf varieties responsive to fertiliser application. Traditional wheat varieties were tall and slender. Their plants grew to 4.5-5 feet height with long and weak stems. When their ear-heads were heavy with well-filled grains, they “lodged” or bent over, even falling flat on the ground. Yields were low at 1-1.5 tonnes per hectare.

Swaminathan had in mind new varieties whose plants were non-lodging and could “tolerate” higher fertiliser doses. Producing one tonne of wheat required 25 kg of nitrogen. If grain yields were to be raised to 4 tonnes per hectare, it was necessary to apply 100 kg of nitrogen, whereas the existing tall cultivars couldn’t even take 40-50 kg!

Swaminathan knew that the solution lay in changing the “architecture” of the wheat plants to enable them to absorb more nutrients and convert these to grain. The new varieties had to be semi-dwarf with strong stems that held the grain-bearing ear-heads or panicles upright even when heavily fertilised. But the panicles themselves needed to be large enough to bear more grains.

Swaminathan initially sought to develop semi-dwarf wheat varieties through mutagenesis — exposing plants to radiation to introduce desirable modifications in their DNA. The strategy didn’t work, as the lowering of plant height led to a simultaneous reduction in the size of the panicles.

Norin-10 wheat, Swaminathan was told by Kihara, had semi-dwarf plants of 2-2.5 feet height and also with large panicles. He further learnt that Samuel Cecil Salmon, an agronomist attached to the US occupying forces under General Douglas MacArthur in Japan after World War-II, had taken the seeds of Norin-10 with him in 1949 and given them to Orville Vogel. The latter, a US Department of Agriculture breeder at the Washington State University in Pullman, had in turn crossed Norin-10 with locally-grown US wheats. From those crosses, Vogel selected one variety in 1956; it yielded 25% more grain and got released as ‘Gaines’.

Swaminathan wrote to Vogel, asking him for the seeds of ‘Gaines’. Vogel was willing, but told him that ‘Gaines’, being a winter wheat, may not flower in Indian conditions. He advised Swaminathan to approach Norman Borlaug, who was with the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexico Agriculture Program. Vogel had shared the seeds of Norin-10 along with his original cross with Borlaug, who then crossed these with the spring wheats grown in Mexico. The resultant high-yielding varieties incorporating the dwarfing genes of Norin-10 in a spring wheat background — Sonara 63, Sonora 64, Mayo 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A — were better suited for cultivation in India.

Swaminathan next wrote to Borlaug and also suggested to the then IARI director B P Pal to invite him to India. Borlaug had agreed to send the seeds of his newly-bred material, but only after studying the growing conditions here. The government machinery being what it was, the invitation requesting the Rockefeller Foundation for the services of Borlaug went only in 1962.

Borlaug finally arrived in March 1963. After visiting major wheat-growing areas of North India, he sent about 100 kg of seeds of the four Mexican varieties in October 1963. These were sown in the 1963-64 rabi season at IARI and also trial fields in Pantnagar and Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh), Ludhiana (Punjab) and Pusa (Bihar).

Encouraged by the results, Swaminathan proposed that the performance of the high-yielding strains be tested in actual farmers’ fields. In November 1964, farmers of Jaunti village in Delhi planted Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A wheat. Most of them harvested 4 tonnes and some even 4.5 tonnes per hectare. The Green Revolution was truly seeded! As Borlaug was to acknowledge, “a great deal of credit must go [to Swaminathan] for first recognizing the potential value of the Mexican wheat dwarfs. Had this not occurred…there would not have been a Green Revolution in Asia”.

The real Green Revolution happened following two consecutive drought years in 1965-66 and 1966-67. As foodgrain production fell to 72-74 million tonnes (mt) during these two years, from an average of 83 mt in the previous five years, India had to rely on imports, mainly of wheat from the US under the latter’s PL-480 programme. These imports peaked at 10.36 mt in 1966.

The “ship to mouth” situation then forced a political decision by the government to import 18,000 tonnes of seeds of the Lerma Rojo 64A and Sonora 64. The rest was history. The planting of those seeds by farmers led to India’s foodgrain production surging to 95 mt in 1967-68 and 108.4 mt by 1970-71. Wheat output alone rose from 11.4 mt in 1966-67 to 16.5 mt in 1967-68 and 23 mt in 1970-71.

The Green Revolution didn’t end there: By the late sixties, Indian scientists had also bred their own Kalyansona and Sonalika wheat varieties through selection of segregated lines from the Mexican lines. These produced amber-coloured grain with better chapati-making quality than the imported red wheats.

The planner and master strategist behind all this was, of course, Swaminathan. All through this, however, he wasn’t ignorant of the adverse side effects of the Green Revolution. As early as January 1968, addressing the Indian Science Congress at Varanasi, he spoke of the dangers of “the rapid replacement of numerous locally adapted varieties with one or two high yielding strains in large contiguous areas”, “intensive cultivation of land without conservation of soil fertility [that could]…lead ultimately to the springing up of deserts”, “indiscriminate use of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides” and “unscientific tapping of groundwater”. Nobody could have been more prophetic!

It was the prelude to his subsequent focus on converting the Green Revolution into an “Evergreen Revolution”, which he defined as “improvement of productivity in perpetuity without ecological harm”.

That same passion and concern about Indian agriculture has extended to Swaminathan’s championing the cause of crop producers. When the National Commission on Farmers that he headed in 2004-06 recommended that the minimum support prices for crops be at least 50 per cent more than the weighted cost of production, it caught on the imagination. Most farmers in India today know of the “Swaminathan formula”, even if they may not know of the legendary agricultural scientist’s stellar role in ushering in the Revolution that made the country self-sufficient in foodgrains.