M.S. Swaminathan proved science needs a seat at the political high table

In his autobiography, I Too Had a Dream (2005), Kurien recalls an incident from 1970: Jagjivan Ram, the minister of agriculture and irrigation, wanted Kurien’s help to set up a private dairy in his constituency of Sasaram in Bihar. But Kurien said his job entailed creating cooperative dairies, not a private venture. “I will not do it," he told the minister curtly.

Kurien soon realised he had committed a grave error. He was warned by well-wishers that the minister was a skilled politician and “when he cut your throat you would not even realise it till your head rolled down." As expected, the minister directed that Kurien be removed as the chairman of Indian Dairy Corporation. Kurien had only one option left. He wrote to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and sought a meeting with her. On hearing his plea, Indira Gandhi instructed the agriculture minister: “Don’t touch Kurien, leave him alone." “Although I was in a small town (Anand in Gujarat), I always had access to all our Prime Ministers," Kurien wrote.

The other event which exemplifies such patronage and trust were the years leading to the green revolution in the 1960s that turned India into a cereal-surplus nation, from being one acutely dependent on foreign food aid. In 1964, M.S. Swaminathan, an agriculture scientist at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), Delhi, was looking to import 18,000 tonnes of seeds of Mexican dwarf wheat varieties developed by American agronomist Norman Borlaug. These were to be sown as part of a large-scale planting of high-yielding varieties. But it would cost precious foreign exchange.

The plan was vociferously opposed by many in the government. But Swaminathan could execute his plan because of the support he received from C. Subramaniam, the agriculture minister, as well as Lal Bahadur Shastri, who was the Prime Minister between 1964-66.

In fact, Swaminathan had quietly invited Shastri to visit trial fields at IARI. One visit was enough for Shastri to speedily approve Swaminathan’s plan to import the seeds. The food front today, Shastri said in a speech after his visit, is almost as vital as the military front. However, this was just the beginning. How India finally turned into a food secure nation, with Swaminathan being its chief architect, is a riveting story.

A new book, The Man who Fed India, by Priyambada Jayakumar traces the journey of Swaminathan in his centenary year. Jayakumar, a historian by training and Swaminathan’s niece, places her subject in the historical-political context of a yet-to-be independent India. After his father, an acclaimed doctor, Gandhian and social reformer who ran a rural hospital in Tamil Nadu passed away, a young Swaminathan was all set to become a doctor and take charge. But the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, which led to the death of at least four million people, shook him. He turned to agriculture instead.

The book begins with a few errors: In the very second page, the birthplace of Swaminathan is mentioned as Kumbakonam, “an idyllic temple town in Kerala". It should be Tamil Nadu. A sentence, on Mahatma Gandhi’s letter to the Maharaja of Travancore thanking him for allowing Dalit families to enter temples, is repeated. In an incident from Swaminathan’s childhood, the derogatory term “street urchins" is used to describe his interaction with underprivileged children tormenting a lizard.

But the next few chapters make for an engrossing read. After graduating in cytogenetics (the study of genetic information in cells) from IARI in 1949, Swaminathan was pushed by his family to appear for the prestigious civil services exam because agriculture sciences offered very few opportunities. He cleared the exam in the first attempt and was appointed to the Indian Police Service.

Fortunately, around the same time, he received a fellowship to study plant genetics and research on potatoes in Holland. He accepted the offer, and a year later moved to England for a PhD at Cambridge (where he ended up spending hours slicing potatoes). After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the US, Swaminathan was offered the position of assistant professor with a generous pay. But the intrepid 28-year-old turned it down and returned home to fulfil a long-cherished dream—to rid India of hunger.

That dream was fulfilled by collaborating with the Iowa-born scientist Borlaug, who had developed high-yielding, short-stemmed varieties of spring wheat. Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, could empathise with Swaminathan. He grew up in abject poverty during the Great Depression years, struggling for a square meal a day.

The miracle happened in 1968. India’s wheat production that year was so massive that schools closed earlier than usual for holidays and movie theatres were enlisted to store surplus grains. In 1971, the government declared that India was self-sufficient in food production. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi put an end to the humiliating PL-480 imports from the US (a 1954 initiative known as the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act and the “Food for Peace" programme, designed to export US agricultural surpluses to developing nations on concessional terms).

The food surplus finally allowed Indira Gandhi to pursue an independent foreign policy: she oversaw the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971. In 1974, India conducted the first nuclear test in Pokhran, Rajasthan. India also provided a war-torn Vietnam with wheat, not caring that it infuriated the Americans.

The next chapter of Swaminathan’s life began when he joined the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines as its first Asian director-general in 1981. In this role, Swaminathan helped multiple Asian countries ramp up research capabilities and production of rice. From helping China set up its first national rice research institute to Swaminathan’s visit to North Korea where he met complaining women farmers and the towering autocrat Kim Il-sung, Jayakumar unpacks these lesser-known years of Swaminathan’s life in great detail. It was during this stint that Swaminathan helped Cambodia turn a rice surplus country from being one on the brink of famine after the brutal years of Khmer Rouge dictatorship.

After seven years at IRRI, Swaminathan returned to India to set up the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai, which did pioneering work on preservation of coastal mangrove ecosystems, among others. Swaminathan was nearly 80 years old when he was appointed chairman of the National Commission on Farmers in 2004. The commission’s primary task was to suggest ways to reform Indian agriculture and alleviate farm distress. One of its recommendations that farmers be paid a price which is 50% more than the comprehensive cost (also known as C2 cost) of cultivation is popularly known among farmers as the “Swaminathan Formula". It continues to be a rallying cry at farmers’ protests to this day.

Jayakumar’s book is a diligent record of India’s most impactful agriculture scientist till his death in 2023. But parts of it read like a eulogy and a tedious listicle of awards and tours. A few aspects from Swaminathan’s life deserved a deeper look—particularly, the fact that the geneticist spoke contradictorily on the adoption of genetically modified or GM technology.

Besides, what were Swaminathan’s thoughts on how to cure India of its cereal addiction (an undesired fallout of the green revolution) and its attendant impact on soil, water and air quality? Come to think of it, India is yet to acquire self-sufficiency in the true sense. After all, it is spending nearly ₹2 trillion every year to import cooking oils and pulses.