Rest in Peace, Dr Swaminathan. You helped India to become food secure

One of the pioneers of Green Revolution. One was MS Swaminathan, he passed away on September 28, 2023. (AP/File)

Most readers of this article may not have stood at a fair price stop to collect their monthly quota of rice or wheat. It is quite probable that their parents would be aware of the same. Their grandparents would surely recall the days when red wheat was issued as monthly ration. If India is largely a food-secure nation today, the credit will go to the success of the Green Revolution. One of its pioneers was MS Swaminathan (August 7, 1925-September 28, 2023).

As Union Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, I sat in the same room which was once occupied by him.

Returned To India

In an earlier generation, scholars with PhD from reputed foreign institutions chose to return to India and join academics and universities. Swaminathan was one of them. He completed his PhD at Cambridge University but came back to join the Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI), Cuttack, where he worked on transferring genetic material for better fertiliser response from Japonica varieties to Indica varieties of rice which were indigenous to the country. The idea of introducing a new genetic strain through breeding emerged out of his initial work at CRRI. This was to later take the shape of the foundation of the Green Revolution, first with wheat and then with rice.

A little later, he joined the Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI) in Delhi, his alma mater from where he had completed his post-graduation. In 1972, he became the Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). In 1979, he was appointed the Principal Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, Government of India, and occupied the room in Krishi Bhawan which still seats the Secretary of Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. Later he served as a member of the Planning Commission and Director General of the International Rice Research Institute, Manila.

In 1987, he was awarded the first World Food Prize (WFP), 1987. With the proceeds of WFP, he set up the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in 1988 as a not-for-profit trust. The Foundation has been working with lakhs of farmers and fishermen, providing them with livelihood support. In November 2004, he was appointed as the Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers, which made a number of important recommendations including the highly contested one of fixing the Minimum Support Price (MSP) at 50 percent over the Comprehensive cost (C2), which includes all paid out costs plus imputed costs of family labour, imputed rent of owned land and imputed interest on owned capital. No government has been able to accept this recommendation as it is feared that Indian agriculture will become totally uncompetitive at the global level if it were to be implemented for all the crops.

Invitation To Borlaug

It was on his proposal to the then DG of IARI BP Pal that Norman Borlaug was invited to India to experiment with dwarf and lodging resistant wheat planting material, brought from the International Centre for Wheat and Maize Improvement in Mexico where the latter was working with spring wheat, which grows in climatic conditions that are similar Indian winter. Borlaug visited IARI in March 1963. The seeds sent by him for semi-dwarf Mexican strains were tried in Haryana. These were called Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo 64. Field trials were conducted at Delhi, Indore, Ludhiana, Kanpur and Pantnagar during the 1963-64 Rabi season. Sonora 64 was first planted in farmers’ fields at Jaunti, a village in Delhi bordering Haryana. Swaminathan was at IARI at this time. This is how the Green Revolution was brought to India, and the nation started moving fast on the road to becoming food secure.

Today, the Green Revolution is frequently criticised for worsening the level of underground water, deterioration of the quality of soil, excessive use of fertilisers and chemical pesticides and polluting the water. It is not remembered that at Independence, only about 15 percent of the cultivated area was under irrigation. Today it is 52 percent. Chemical fertilisers were not used, and import was considered imprudent, as India was short of foreign exchange. Swaminathan was aware of the dangers of monoculture and the need to conserve soil fertility. He spoke against the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides. In an article in The Hindu Businessline on August 14, 2022 he wrote of Ever Green Revolution.

Towards the end of his illustrious inning, he had his quota of controversies. He wrote a paper titled ‘Modern Technologies for Sustainable Food and Nutrition Security’, in Current Science in which he said that there is no doubt that genetically engineered Bt cotton has failed in India. Several economists have found Bt Cotton as transformative. His legacy demands that science is respected by those in power and adequate funding is provided to research institutions. The most critical challenge is climate change and only science can provide an answer.

 Siraj Hussain is a former Agriculture Secretary to the Government of India. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.