Western Ghats yam species named after Kerala cop
KASARGOD: Team of researchers from the state have named a new species of yam they discovered in the Western Ghats — Dioscorea balakrishnanii — after a police officer with the Kerala Police.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time a plant species is being named after Additional DySP V Balakrishnan.
In 2019, a species discovered in the Shola forests of Wayanad was also named after him -- Tylophora balakrishnanii. And with good reason.
Before joining the police force, Balakrishnan, belonging to Aravath in Kasaragod district, was a researcher with the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and was stationed at its Wayanad unit.
He went on to acquire a doctorate in ‘Genetic Diversity of Wild Edible Yams of Southern Western Ghats’ from Madras University after donning the police uniform. Currently, Balakrishnan is on deputation as the member-secretary of the Kerala State Biodiversity Board.
The researchers who named the plant species after him said Balakrishnan was a pioneer in studying the tuber plant species in Wayanad.
“No one in Kerala has studied the tuber plant species in Western Ghats like he did. So we felt naming the new yam species after him would be a tribute to his work,” Jose Mathew, an assistant professor of Botany with Sanatana Dharma College in Alappuzha, who was part of the research team, told TNIE.
“My journey with plants started at a young age because we worked in the farm as a family. Mother taught us paddy cultivation,” said Balakrishnan.
He completed his bachelor’s degree in Botany from the Government College in Kasaragod and decided to become a teacher by pursuing BEd. Later, he did his master’s at the Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu.
“After MSc, I sought a job and joined the MSSRF station at Kalpetta as a junior research fellow in 1998. I met M S Swaminathan there, when he was busy with the preparations of the Biodiversity Act the country would eventually bring in in 2002,” Balakrishnan recalled.
Nevertheless, the veteran scientist agreed to guide Balakrishnan with his PhD work. Balakrishnan was tasked with researching rice, mushrooms and tribal livelihood in Wayanad.
“My interactions with the tribal people of Wayanad helped me explore the region. One of my jobs was to study their knowledge and document them, and I was exposed to their local wisdom of plants. Tubers are an important part of their diet,” he said. But Balakrishnan’s career took a different turn in 2003 when he cleared the Kerala Public Service Commission’s sub-inspector examination.
“A uniformed service was an honour for me as I hailed from a farming background,” he said. He was posted across the region and conferred with the Chief Minister’s Award too within the next five years. All that meant that his thesis work suffered.
After five years of service as a police officer, Balakrishnan was posted as a law instructor at the Kerala Police Academy in Thrissur in 2008. The then academy director, Alexander Jacob, encouraged him to finish his PhD.
“The thesis work was pending and Dr Sujanapal from the Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI) agreed to help me. So, I would finish my work at the academy during the day and ride to KFRI in the evening to finish my thesis,” Balakrishnan said.
Finally, ten years after starting research, Balakrishnan got his doctorate in 2010.
“As a strange coincidence, I was the Kalpetta police inspector when I was awarded the PhD,” he said. When an opportunity arose to head MSSRF’s Kalpetta research station, he took a sabbatical from the police and joined as the station director in 2016.
Two years later, he joined the Kerala State Biodiversity Board as the member-secretary.
During the Covid pandemic, he returned to the police force as a vigilance DySP, followed by stints as DySP of Kanhangad and DySP of Intelligence before going on deputation to the biodiversity board for a second term as its member-secretary in 2023.
Ten-year work led to discovery of Dioscorea Balakrishnani
It took the researchers ten years to discover and describe Dioscorea balakrishnanii, a yam variety locally known as ‘chozha kizhangu’ found near the evergreen forest patches of Western Ghats. The team that discovered and classified the tuber comprised Pichen M Salim of MSSRF, Wayanad, M M Safeer, assistant professor with the Kerala Agricultural University, and Jose Mathew. “The tuber has male and female plants and finding them at the flowering stage and documenting them took a long time,” Jose said. Their findings have been published in the international scientific journal ‘Species’.