Top agricultural scientist Swaminathan mourned
M.S. Swaminathan, an Indian agricultural scientist who vastly expanded his country’s production of wheat and rice as a mastermind of the “Green Revolution” in the 1960s, an initiative that was credited with saving millions of people from starvation, died Sept. 28 at his home in the city of Chennai. He was 98.
His death was announced by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai, a nonprofit organization founded by Dr. Swaminathan to speed agricultural and rural development through science and technology.
He came of age amid one of the worst disasters to strike India in the 20th century, the Bengal famine of 1943, estimated to have killed as many as 3 million people.
The son of a surgeon, he had hoped to pursue a career in medicine, but set aside those plans to study agriculture after witnessing the agony of the famine.
Dr. Swaminathan held various positions in government and scientific institutions, including the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi and, in the later years of his life, the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India’s Parliament.
Before the innovations that Dr. Swaminathan helped introduce, India struggled to feed its rapidly expanding population.
It faced widespread deprivation and death even absent acute famine like the one that devastated Bengal. The country was heavily dependent on imports of food products including wheat, to the extent that it became known as living “ship-to-mouth.”
Dr. Swaminathan built on the work of Norman E. Borlaug, an American botanist who launched the international Green Revolution by helping make Mexico a self-sufficient wheat producer in the 1940s and 1950s.
Applying Borlaug’s principles to Indian agriculture, Dr. Swaminathan introduced high-yield crop varieties, irrigation and fertilizers — essentially delivering industrial farming to India, particularly the states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
The annual wheat crop increased from 10 million tons in 1964 to 17 million tons in 1968. In an obituary for Borlaug, who died in 2009, the New York Times reported that the Indian wheat crop of 1968 was so great that schools were made into makeshift granaries.
“This infused a great deal of confidence,” Dr. Swaminathan told the publication the Indian Express, “because those were days when Indian farmers had been written off by very leading authorities.”
By the end of his career, although India continued to struggle for periods with drought and famine, it had become one of the world’s top producers of wheat and rice.