Dr. Ms. Swaminathan, the father of India’s green revolution, passed away at the age of 98 at the date 28 September 2023
Dr. M. S. Swaminathan, the renowned agricultural scientist called the father of India’s green revolution. Dr. Ms. Swaminathan, the father of India’s green revolution passed away on September 28 at the age of 98 at his residence in Chennai. The Padma Vibhushan awardee was the director well known of the Indian Council of Agricultural Studies and headed the global rice research institute in the Philippines. He became the first to get the World Meals Prize and used the proceeds from the prize to establish the famous MSSRF non-profit. As tributes pour in from across the globe, here’s a list of articles posted using the Hindu these days on M. S. Swaminathan’s death.
The man-made Bengal famine of 1943 that pushed as many as 3 million people to starvation and eventual death deeply moved M.S. Swaminathan, then an aspiring medical student. He changed his field to study agriculture, specializing in genetics and breeding, driven by its potential to improve crop varieties and human lives.
Swaminathan became instrumental in doubling India’s wheat manufacturing within a short time, pulling the U. S . A . Out of its ‘deliver-to-mouth’ dependence on food aid from the United States. In 1966, faced with an excessive drought, India imported 10 million tonnes of wheat.
The inexperienced revolution began in 1965 and centered on introducing excessive-yielding dwarf wheat sorts to farmers in north India. They were grown with chemical fertilizers and pesticides to maximize yields, and farmers were assured a guaranteed charge.
Swaminathan’s imaginative and prescient converted India from a ‘begging bowl’ to a ‘breadbasket’ nearly overnight, the World Food Foundation stated, honoring him as its first Global Meals Prize laureate in 1987. In 1971, he won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for being both a ‘terrific scientist’ and a ‘humanist.
“In the 4,000 years of wheat cultivation in the Indian subcontinent since the time of Mohenjo-Daro, yields had doubled in 4 years, 1964 to 1968,” Swaminathan said in an interview with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. 2014. The wheat revolution was later replicated in crops like rice, maize, sorghum, and potato.
To introduce the new types to Indian farmers, Swaminathan labored carefully with agronomist and plant breeder Norman Borlaug in the 1950s. Borlaug went directly to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his paintings on new wheat sorts in Mexico, India, and Pakistan.
Swaminathan becomes more than just a plant breeder. He changed into a passionate administrator who headed the Indian Council of Agricultural Studies, worked closely with farmers throughout India, and changed into primary secretary within the agriculture ministry (1979-80). He becomes also a member of the making plans commission (1980-eighty two) and director of the International Rice Studies Institute in the Philippines.
Swaminathan is likewise an often-referred call among farmers, a completely unique fulfillment for a scientist, for a sequence of stories he submitted to the government between 2004 and 2006.
As chair of the National Commission of Farmers, the ‘Swaminathan record’ probed the reasons for farm distress. One of its hints is that minimum guide expenses (MSP) need to as a minimum be 50% greater than common manufacturing expenses, which is still a primary demand of farm unions throughout India. Msp is the price at which the authorities purchase plants directly from farmers.
Also read: cheap wheat imports will reverse fulfillment of green revolution: M.S. Swaminathan
Dr. Ms. Swaminathan
Swaminathan additionally courted a few controversies. After terming genetically changed (gm) cotton (added to Indian farmers in 2004) a failure and thinking about the safety of gm brinjal and mustard in a 2018 paper, Swaminathan got here below hearth from the medical community. Humans must now not worship generation, he later stated in an interview with the journal Technology.
Avid practitioners of ecological and organic farming have again and again criticized the legacy of the inexperienced revolution for its position in polluting natural assets like soil and water due to the overuse of chemical vitamins and pesticides by farmers.