Sugarcane is a major cash crop in India, having yielded 33.7 million tons of sugar in 2023-24. Significant work towards perfecting Indian sugarcane was accomplished by botanist Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal. Born on November 4, 1897, in Thalassery, Kerala, to Diwan Bahadur Edavalath Kakkat Krishnan, the then deputy collector of Malabar, Janaki went on to pursue botany at the University of Michigan, from where she obtained a PhD in 1931. With a keen interest in plant-breeding, ethnobotany, cytogenetics (study of the structure and properties of chromosomes, and their behaviour during mitosis and meiosis) and phytogeography (study of the taxonomic groups of plants), she worked on plants of medicinal and economic value from Kerala’s rainforests.
In 1934, Janaki worked on sugarcane biology at the Sugarcane Breeding Station in Coimbatore. The primary purpose of this facility was to improve indigenous sugarcane varieties. At that time, the sweetest sugarcane in the world was ‘Saccharum officianarum’ from Papua New Guinea, which India was importing. As part of her work, Janaki manipulated polyploid cells through cross-breeding of hybrids in the laboratory, and created a high-yielding strain of the cane that would thrive in Indian conditions. Her research also helped analyse the geographical distribution of sugarcane across India, and established that the ‘Saccharum spontaneum’ variety had originated here.
In 1939, Janaki attended the 7th International Congress of Genetics, Edinburgh, and spent the next six years at the John Innes Centre as an assistant cytologist to CD Darlington. Together they published a ‘Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants’ in 1945. She was invited to work as a cytologist at the Royal Horticultural Society, Wisley, during 1945-51, during which she experimented on the hybridisation of Magnolias. She also produced hybrid varieties of brinjals. Later, the Government of India invited her to reorganise the Botanical Survey of India, and she was appointed the first director of the Central Botanical Laboratory in Prayagraj. From 1962, she was officer on special duty at Regional Research Laboratory in Jammu, and also briefly worked at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Trombay, before settling down in Chennai in 1970, working as Emeritus Scientist at the Centre for Advanced Study in Botany at the University of Madras.
In 1977, Janaki was awarded the Padma Shri, and she passed away on February 7, 1984.