MS Swaminathan, architect of India’s green revolution, 1925-2023

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MS Swaminathan, who has died aged 98, was a college student in Kerala during the devastating famine of 1942-43 in Bengal. A severe rice shortage killed around 3 million people – witnessing the disaster shaped his career. “I decided to use agricultural research to help poor farmers produce more,” he later said wrote.

Swaminathan would later become the chief architect of India’s “green revolution” that would transform a country chronically hungry and permanently patronized by foreign donors into one of the world’s largest food producers.

As a geneticist and manager, he designed and championed new ways to optimize crop productivity by introducing high-yielding wheat and rice seedling varieties to farm fields. An early advocate of permaculture, Swaminathan was ahead of his time and spoke of an “evergreen revolution” which he once described as “the green revolution plus ecology – productivity is permanent, Rather than advancing by leaps and bounds.”

Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan was born on August 7, 1925 in Kumbakonam, Madras (now Tamil Nadu) in southern India. He studied zoology at the Maharaja’s College in Trivandrum, but turned to agriculture after assessing wartime food shortages in India and the famine in Bengal. Academics believe this was caused by the actions of British authorities.

In his twenties, Swaminathan traveled abroad on a UNESCO scholarship, first studying plant engineering in the Netherlands and then completing a PhD at Cambridge University. He completed postdoctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he met American agriculturist and Green Revolution supporter Norman Borlaug, who won the 1970 Nobel Prize for his work on global food supplies Award.

After returning to India, Swaminathan experimented with cultivating new rice varieties with higher yields at the Central Rice Research Institute in the eastern state of Orissa (now Odisha). In the years after independence, the country suffered a mini-famine and relied on foreign aid—what Swaminathan and others call “ship-to-mouth survival.”

Global discussion surrounding the country’s agriculture-reliant economy has largely focused on the zero-sum Malthusian trade-off between population growth and food shortages. The international community views India’s hunger problem as a globally classified problem and has Famine 1975! America’s decision: Who will survive?.

Swaminathan began working with Borlaug to import seeds of a semi-dwarf wheat variety that had higher yields than wheat grown in India and responded well to irrigation and fertilization. The crop is then promoted across a network of demonstration farms. Borlaug later credited Swaminathan with recognizing the potential value of Mexican dwarf wheat. “If this had not happened, there probably would not have been a Green Revolution in Asia,” says American agriculturist wrote after he won the Nobel Prize.

In the 1970s, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi appointed Swaminathan to a senior position in the government responsible for reforming agriculture. By the next decade, India’s food production grew faster than its population.

Swaminathan’s achievements earned him a reputation abroad and he served as an advisor to international organizations, serving as the first Asian Director-General of the International Rice Research Institute in Manila from 1982. In the 1990s, he studied rice and other genetically modified crops that were more tolerant of saltwater. From 2002 to 2005, he co-chaired the United Nations Millennium Program on Hunger. He was a voice of conscience, speaking in a 1983 speech of a “world of inequality and contradiction” in which some 500 million Asians lived in absolute poverty and went to bed hungry.

Today, Indian agriculture is in surplus, thanks in part to Swaminathan’s efforts. But hunger and rural poverty remain problems. Although Indian agriculture is highly productive, it is hardly sustainable. Commercial farms in the north of the country are efficient, but they face many of the ills foreseen by Swaminathan, including land and water salinization and overuse of pesticides in areas of intensive farming.

“As one of the most dynamic agricultural countries in the world, we face a paradox,” he said Tell said an Indian interviewer in 2004. “At the same time, we have the unenviable reputation of having the highest number of malnourished children, women and men.”