MS Swaminathan
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A brief biography
Sep 28, 2023: The Times of India
Born in Kumbakonam on August 7, 1925, Swaminathan had switched from studying medicine to the agricultural sector after the Great Bengal Famineof 1943 broke out.
He was the founder ofMS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF).
Let's take a look at his career and achievements
- Swaminathan started his career in 1949 through researches on the genetics of potato, wheat, rice and jute.
- He was also given the title of 'Father of Economic Ecology' by the United Nations Environment Programme.
- In 1960s, when India was on the verge of a mass famine leading to a shortage of food grains, Swaminathan, along with Norman Borlaug and other scientists developed a high-yield variety seeds of wheat. The development marked a transition from traditional agriculture in India to the introduction of high-yielding varieties of seeds and the associated techniques. This led to the green revolution in India and Swaminathan was called the Father of the Green Revolution.
- Swaminathan has held administrative positions in various agricultural research laboratories. He served as the director general of Indian Council of Agricultural Research and later International Rice Research Institute.
- He also served as the principal secretary of the ministry of agriculture in 1979.
- In 1988, Swaminathan became the president of the International Union of the Conservation of Nature and Natural resources.
- Swaminathan has won several awards and accolades for his contribution in the field of agricultural sciences. He was given the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 1961 and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 1986. Swaminathan was given the first World Food Prize in 1987.
- The Indian government awarded him the Padma Shri in 1967 and Padma Bhushan in 1972 and Padma Vibushan in 1989.
- After completing his bachelors in agricultural science and post graduate degree in cytogenetics, Swaminathan had worked and collaborated with researchers and students on a range of issues in basic and applied plant breeding, agricultural research and development and the conservation of natural resources.
Introducing new genetic strains; the strategies behind the Green Revolution
Harish Damodaran, Sep 28, 2023: The Indian Express
From the Express Archives, an article from 2015 that takes a look back at the transformative years when Swaminathan’s groundbreaking work led India from being a ‘basket case’ to achieving food grain self-sufficiency. Discover the strategies behind the Green Revolution, Swaminathan’s crucial role in introducing new genetic strains, and his persistent efforts in enhancing fertilizer response in both wheat and rice cultivars.
Dr. MS Swaminathan, member Planning Commission (extreme right) inaugurating a conference of Vice Chancellors of Universitites and Directors of Research Institutes located all along the river Ganes. The conference is aimed at promoting the study of the Ganga in all its aspects.
But around this time, Swaminathan — who kept abreast of the latest crop research — had learnt of ‘Norin-10’, a semi-dwarf wheat with large panicles originally bred in Japan and collected by Samuel Cecil Salmon, an agronomist with the post-World War II American occupation administration under General Douglas MacArthur. This variety was used by Orville Vogel at Washington State University to breed a winter wheat, ‘Gaines’, containing the Norin-10 dwarfing genes and giving very high yields. Swaminathan, in 1960, wrote to Vogel, requesting for the seeds of Gaines. Vogel readily obliged, while also warning that, being a winter wheat, it may not flower in India. He further advised Swaminathan to approach Norman Borlaug, who had incorporated the same dwarfing genes through Vogel’s lines into his spring wheat varieties in Mexico that were better suited for India. This was precisely what Swaminathan was looking at: A new plant type that was short and yet with normal spikes, which could use more fertiliser and water to give higher grain yields per acre.
In April 1962, Swaminathan sent a detailed proposal to the then IARI Director, B.P. Pal, seeking to invite Borlaug to India and initiate a wheat breeding programme with dwarf spring wheat material from Mexico. The rest is history. Borlaug visited IARI in March 1963 and later on sent the seeds from the best of his semi-dwarf Mexican wheat strains, Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo 64. The selections and varieties developed from those launched the Green Revolution. By the end of the decade, India’s wheat production had crossed 20 mt. The catalyst here was clearly Swaminathan. As Borlaug put it, he deserved “a great deal of the credit … for first recognising the potential value of the Mexican wheat dwarfs. Had this not occurred, it is quite possible that there would not have been a Green Revolution in Asia”. The same strategy of changing plant architecture to confer lodging-resistance and enable higher fertiliser application was followed for rice — in this case, using Taichung Native 1, an Indica variety developed in Taiwan carrying the semi-dwarf ‘Dee-Gee-Woo-Gen’ genes.
Swaminathan, all through this, wasn’t ignorant of the side effects of the Green Revolution. As early as January 1968, addressing 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 underground water”. Could anyone have been more prophetic and still clear that there was no alternative to raising yields? It was the prelude to his subsequent focus on converting the Green Revolution into an ‘evergreen revolution’ — “improvement of productivity in perpetuity without ecological harm”, as he reiterated in his Friday address.
That same passion and genuine concern has extended to championing the cause of crop producers. When National Commission on Farmers that he headed in 2004-06 recommended that MSP for crops be at least 50 per cent more than the weighted average cost of production, it caught on like wild fire. Even Narendra Modi made this part of his poll campaign; his promise to fix MSPs by adding 50 per cent profits to farmers’ input costs won many votes, though it is waiting to be implemented.
“Someday, I am sure the formula of cost-plus-50 per cent will be adopted. There is no other way”, believed Swaminathan, who radiated the same youthful optimism even at 90.
The article was originally published on 13-08-2015.
Productivity without ecological harm
Harish Damodaran, Sep 29, 2023: The Indian Express
Norman Borlaug may have been the Father of the Green Revolution, but its architect in India was undoubtedly Monkomb Sambasivan Swaminathan.
The legendary agricultural scientist was hardly 30 in 1955 when he heard from Hitoshi Kihara, the well-known wheat geneticist from Japan, about Norin-10, a semi-dwarf variety bred at an experimental station in that country’s Iwate Prefecture.
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.
