Excerpt from 'MS Swaminathan: The Man Who Fed India' talks about how a young scientist’s letter to Borlaug set in motion the revolution that freed India from hunger
‘Science is not some Aladdin’s lamp. You have to work hard,’ Jawaharlal Nehru once wrote, and it struck an immediate chord with M.S. Swaminathan. So much so that he scribbled this quote in his own hand and kept it with him in his office for inspiration. Far from being a magic lamp, science was actually a challenge, a meaningful one, nonetheless, that required constant improvisation and an out-of-the-box thinking, something Swaminathan was incredibly good at.
Sambasivan, Swaminathan’s father, believed that ‘no task was impossible were one to put one’s mind to it’. As a doctor, he often used the phrase ‘malady-remedy’ in his practice, if only to emphasise the fact that for every ailment or ‘malady’ there was an available ‘remedy’ or ‘treatment’, provided one looked hard enough.
India’s ‘malady’ was well known to all — her inability to eke enough out of her own soil to feed her burgeoning population. The ‘remedy’ was, therefore, all too clear for Swaminathan to see. He needed seeds — magic, revolutionary seeds — which would give shorter, stronger stems with grain-bearing ears, which could withstand rain and wind and be successfully harvested.
The new wheat variety
Swaminathan knew he had to look around and seek scientific help from other, equally committed scientists, in order to save time and beget cutting-edge technologies if he had to leapfrog India’s food production in a decisively short period of time. Over the years, he had carefully developed and nurtured synergies with scientists all across the globe, and these informal conversations within the scientific community itself slowly but surely nudged him towards his goal.
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Hitoshi Kihara, the famous Japanese wheat scientist, was visiting India in 1958 and told Swaminathan about Dr Gonziro Inazuka’s Norin Experiment station, which had successfully bred semi-dwarf, short-stemmed varieties with long panicles and bigger grain-bearing heads called Norin-10. These were originally bred in the Hokkaido area of Japan and collected by Samuel Cecil Salmon, who was an agronomist with the post-Second World War American occupation of Japan under General Douglas MacArthur. This variant was then used by US breeder Orville Vogel at Washington State University to breed a temperate or a winter wheat variety called ‘Gaines’, which contained the Norin-10 dwarfing genes and was giving incredibly high yields of wheat.
Swaminathan immediately wrote to Dr Vogel in 1960, asking him to send a batch of the ‘Gaines’ seeds to see if it would flower in Delhi. Vogel readily obliged, but warned him that being a winter wheat, it may not flower in India. He then advised Swaminathan to write to Dr Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist, who had developed a high-yielding short-stalked variety of wheat at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in El Batán, Mexico, which were far better suited for Indian planting conditions. This is exactly what India needed and what Swaminathan was looking for— a new wheat variety that was short-stemmed yet with normal spikes that could use more fertiliser and water, and give higher yields per acre of land without bending or ‘lodging.’
Norman Borlaug set stage for revolution
Swaminathan knew his search for a ‘miracle’ seed was likely nearing its end, but he had no time to waste. In 1960, as Head of the Wheat Programme at IARI, he shot off a letter to Dr B.P. Pal, the IARI Director, requesting him to invite Dr Borlaug to India to start a wheat inbreeding programme with dwarf spring wheat materials from Mexico. Swaminathan was already acquainted with Dr Borlaug, having met him way back in 1953 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, when Borlaug had given a speech about a novel method of controlling rust, a disease in wheat, which Swaminathan had attended — and they had chatted informally afterwards.
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There was a lot of bureaucracy in India around inviting foreigners to work collaboratively back then, and Swaminathan had to be mindful of these rules whilst he informally contacted Borlaug to see if he would be willing to share his ‘miracle seeds’ with Indian scientists and farmers, which Swaminathan was convinced would work. Borlaug agreed to visit India pending a formal invitation from the government.
Dr B.P. Pal finally managed to convince the Ministry of Agriculture to send Dr Borlaug an invitation to come visit India at the end of 1962. On 1 March 1963, Dr Norman Borlaug landed in Delhi, and the stage was finally set for an upheaval and, essentially, a revolution.
(Excerpted from M.S. Swaminathan: The Man Who Fed India by Priyambada Jayakumar, with permission from HarperCollins India)
