Any biographer of MS Swaminathan, the architect of the Green Revolution in India, would be hard-pressed to document the ideals, the towering achievements, and the accolades that would do justice to the life of a person who remains larger than life. To cursorily touch upon all the milestones of his life and document them would take reams, and to stuff all the information into an almost 300-page book is a feat to be admired. Author Priyambada Jayakumar in MS Swaminathan: The Man Who Fed India does exactly that. She is fortuitously also a distant relative of the subject, providing a perspective not accessible to the outsider, though she manages to keep herself short of fangirling. This is an old-style biography, more like a first step to getting to know the man who made India food secure.
The book chronicles his life as a young man, when he heeded Gandhi’s call for nation-building and abjured the career of his first choice, medicine, to provide scientific enquiry as an agricultural scientist. “A hungry person listens not to reason, not cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers. He wants food today.” This saying of Seneca, against the backdrop of terrible famines, made him determine to make food accessible to all.
A BSc in Agricultural Sciences, Swaminathan went to IARI, and then abroad for doctoral and post-doctoral studies. He met brilliant agricultural scientists of his time and returned to India to serve. His first stop was at the Central Rice Research Institute at Cuttack, after which he was appointed at IARI. The rest is history. In 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri wanted him to take over the Agriculture and Food ministries. “Shastri’s famous slogan, Jai Javan, Jai Kisan … pointed to a very crucial policy departure from Nehruvian top-down heavy industrialisation to matters of agriculture and agrarian distress, defence and national security. It also acknowledged the dual role played by farmers in not just food security but also national security, as most soldiers were drawn from farming backgrounds.”
The book, however, overlooks a few things. He assumed that India needed genetically-modified rice seeds imported from Mexico, which would require three times as much groundwater. In a grain-rich nation, he focused only on rice and wheat. Within three generations, we are seeing the fall-out of these policies: pushing the imported rice seeds through subsidies, building dams for irrigation or power, making India fertiliser-reliant and failing to measure the outcomes in long-term costs or nutritional value. Indigenous accessible nutritional sources are sidelined into obscurity.
To be fair, Jayakumar makes efforts to document Swaminathan’s course correction. There are references to biodiversity projects in Odisha and the retraction of the proposed Silent Valley development. Ultimately, the book honours the towering figure who has made such a mark on the nation, the man to whom India owes its food bank.