Dr. M. S Swaminathan, the renowned agricultural scientist known as the Father of India’s Green Revolution, passed away in Chennai on September 28 at the age of 98.
About Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan
- Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan was born in Kumbakonam in the then Madras Presidency.
- He is known as the “Father of the Green Revolution in India”, for his leadership and success in introducing and further developing high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice in India.
- Continuing his research with Dr. Norman Borlaug (Nobel Peace Prize winner) on wheat varieties, Dr. Swaminathan modified grains in the laboratories to better suit the Indian soil, giving higher yield and free of infestation.
- He then convinced farmers in India’s rural northern belt – Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh to set up small demonstration and test plots to cultivate these genetically modified wheat varieties.
- Swaminathan has been conferred with the Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan.
- He was Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and headed the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
- He was the first to get the World Food Prize and used the proceeds from the prize to establish the renowned MSSRF non-profit trust.
- Called the ‘Father of the Green Revolution’, he played a major role in the set of changes introduced in farming in the 1960s and ‘70s that helped India achieve food security.
- He cleared the examination for the civil services but Swaminathan was interested in agriculture foremost and soon ended up pursuing research in the field.
- In 1954, he started working at the Central Rice Research Institute, Cuttack, on transferring genes for fertiliser response from Japonica varieties to Indica varieties.
- In 2004, Swaminathan was appointed as chair of the National Commission on Farmers, a commission setup to look into farmer distress amid alarming suicide cases. The commission submitted its report in 2006 and suggested, among its recommendations, that the Minimum Selling Price (MSP) should be at least 50 percent more than the weighted average cost of production.
- He was elected as President of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Pugwash Conferences on science and world affairs – another first for a citizen from a developing nation.
- He is also the recipient of the H K Firodia award, the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award and the Indira Gandhi Prize, apart from several international awards including the Ramon Magsaysay Award (1971) and the Albert Einstein World Science Award (1986).
