Celebrating Dr M S Swaminathan's Peerless Contribution to Agriculture

India has lost the main architect and global leader of the green revolution, Dr Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan. A visionary who played a key role in introducing and further developing highyielding varieties of wheat and rice and strived to deliver innovations in agriculture.

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Dr Swaminathan's collaborative scientific efforts with American agronomist Dr Norman Borlaug, spearheading a mass movement with farmers and other scientists, backed by public policies, saved India from certain famine-like conditions in the 1960s.

Swaminathan’s work, as a PhD and postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge and Wisconsin, was primarily in potato genetics and breeding. Yet, he was undoubtedly the master strategist and charioteer of Indian agriculture. His ability to keep abreast of global agricultural breakthroughs, tracing the Norin-10 dwarfing genes in wheat from Japan and locating Orville Vogel and Borlaug, who had developed varieties incorporating these in the US and Mexico respectively.