The year was 2005. There had been a wave of farmer suicides in the Indian state of Maharashtra. The mainstream press paid scant attention, but MS Swaminathan rushed to the scene with a team of officials. “He was in tears listening to the families of those who had ended their own lives,” says journalist P Sainath in a tribute.
This image of the renowned scientist – well into his golden years – championing distressed farmers is one that epitomises MS Swaminathan’s life’s work.
Swaminathan, who has died at 98, is renowned as the father of the green revolution in India, for his introduction of high-yielding genetic varieties of rice and wheat. His work alongside American agronomist Norman Borlaug led to the doubling of wheat yields in Pakistan and India in the late 1960s.
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan was born in 1925, in Chennai, then known as Madras. He was only 18 when he witnessed the devastating effects of the Bengal famine, which led to the deaths of about 3 million people. The experience spurred him into a career in the agricultural sciences.
After earning degrees from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Wageningen Agricultural University’s institute of genetics, and the University of Cambridge, he turned down a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin. He chose instead to return to India with his wife, Mina, who he met at Cambridge (Mina died in 2022). The couple had three daughters, all of whom went on to become established figures in the academia and global development: Nitya Rao is professor of gender and development at the University of East Anglia; Madhura Swaminathan is professor at the economic analysis unit at the Indian Statistical Institute; and Soumya Swaminathan is the former chief scientist at the World Health Organization.
On returning to India, Swaminathan collaborated with Borlaug in crossing Japanese and Mexican dwarf varieties of wheat, which led to the high-yield, disease-free crop strains that revolutionised world agriculture. Borlaug won the Nobel peace prize for his work, and he credited Swaminathan for first recognising the potential value in the successful crop varieties.
Because of Swaminathan’s efforts, India went from being drought-stricken and dependent on US imports in the 1960s to being declared self-sufficient in food production in 1971. He was awarded the first World Food prize in 1987 for his work.
He then turned his energies towards supporting India’s beleaguered farmers. As head of the National Commission on Farmers, he produced several reports which recommended minimum support prices for crops, suggestions for faster and more inclusive growth, and a holistic national policy addressing farmer suicides.
In a statement to the Guardian, fellow green revolution stalwart Gurdev Khush noted that Swaminathan also played a crucial role in building India’s relationship with international organisations such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank. “He was a visionary and an inspiring leader,” says Khush, who worked with Swaminathan during his term as the first Asian director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
Several figures have remembered his gentle disposition. Ronnie Coffman, emeritus professor at Cornell and Borlaug’s PhD student, looks back fondly on Swaminathan’s tenure as honorary professor at Cornell. “What I remember most about him was his kindness and consideration toward every person he met,” says Coffman.
The World Food Prize Foundation chief operating officer Mashal Husain echoes his sentiments: “His keen insight into the many different food and agricultural issues was rivalled only by his warm encouragement and mentoring of young students.”
However, Swaminathan was not without his critics. As a consequence of the green revolution, the agricultural industry witnessed a widespread increase in the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. He subsequently concentrated his efforts on an “evergreen” revolution, which he defined as “improvement of productivity in perpetuity without ecological harm”.
To address the issue, Swaminathan used the proceeds from the World Food prize to start the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation. The foundation aims to accelerate the goals of the evergreen revolution, taking a “pro-poor, pro-women and pro-nature” approach. He would go on to donate the winnings of future awards to the foundation as well.
Swaminathan was garlanded in international and national circles. In addition to the World Food prize, he was conferred awards by the Netherlands, the Philippines, France, Cambodia and China. He was also highly decorated within his country, having received India’s second, third and fourth highest civilian awards. Many feel that also he deserved the Bharat Ratna (India’s highest honour). “He was above feeling any resentment over this,” says the former diplomat Gopalkrishna Gandhi. “But his conspicuous absence from that scroll of honour in his home country which owes so much to him, impoverishes that list for sure.”
Indian scientist Ashok K Singh reflected on Swaminathan’s legacy in a statement to the press. “An era of agricultural research, education and extension filled with disruptive innovation comes to an end,” says Singh, who is director at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (Swaminathan himself was a director in the 1960s).
Singh summed up Swaminathan’s work by saying: “If God appears to the poor and hungry in the form of bread, as Mahatma Gandhi said, then that God is Dr Swaminathan, who should be revered by every citizen while partaking in their daily meals.”
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, agronomist, agricultural scientist, plant geneticist, administrator and humanitarian, born 7 August 1925; died 28 September 2023
