Swaminathan will go down in history as the person who pulled India out of the ‘hunger trap’. This was the biggest achievement of the 20th century, says agroeconomist, Devinder Sharma
Photo: @msswaminathan / X, formerly Twitter
One frame that epitomises the life of Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, who died on September 28, 2023, is a black-and-white photo from March 1964. It shows a group of men standing in a wheat field near Delhi in North India.
Most of the men are Indians. They are standing around a tall, bespectacled white man who seems to be holding something between his index finger and thumb, just above the rows of wheat stalks. To his left is another bespectacled man, looking at the foreigner.
The second bespectacled man is Swaminathan. The tall white man is the Norwegian-American colossus, Norman Borlaug, the “Father of the Green Revolution”. 1964, when the photo was taken, was the height of the Green Revolution in India, which Borlaug and Swaminathan have been credited with bringing about.
Swaminathan, who was born in 1925 in the town of Kumbakonam in the then-colonial Madras Presidency, is a man who changed billions of lives through his work. With him and Borlaug leading the charge in developing and introducing high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, India bid a final goodbye to food insecurity and famine.
“Swaminathan will go down in history as the person who pulled India out of the ‘hunger trap’. This was the biggest achievement of the 20th century, and it benefitted both India and the world,” agroeconomist Devinder Sharma told Down To Earth.
Sharma is not wrong. India was in a perilous situation in 1947. The former colony hardly had enough food to feed its people. It lived a ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence, with ships from abroad bringing life-saving grain to feed the people. And the number of mouths to feed was rising.
It led prophets of doom like Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich to famously proclaim in his work, The Population Bomb:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate ...
What Ehrlich did not know was that there were men like Borlaug and Swaminathan, who had the gift of latest scientific advancements in hand.
The Green Revolution started in the village of Jaunti in Delhi. It was spearheaded by farmers in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. By the time it peaked, India’s food problems vanished. Not only did the country become food-secure but also became a net exporter of wheat and rice.
But it is not that the Green Revolution brought only glad tidings. In the three regions which were its crucible, the environment took a terrible beating. Groundwater tables declined. The soil and water became poisoned due to excessive pesticides and fertilisers. Crop diversity gave way to the wheat-paddy cycle. Indeed, many in Punjab have partly blamed the Green Revolution for the violent separatist insurgency that happened in the 1980s and 1990s.
But Sharma says it is not a man like Swaminathan who should bear the cross for this. “I know the feeling in certain sections that the Green Revolution hurtled India into an environmental crisis. It is easy to blame Swaminathan for that. But it must be noted that he had observed in the 1970s that more of the Green Revolution will lead India to disaster. However, policy makers glossed over this statement of his,” he told DTE.
Swaminathan has said in 1968:
Intensive cultivation of land without conservation of soil fertility and soil structure would lead ultimately to the springing of deserts. Irrigation without arrangements for drainage would result in soils getting alkaline or saline. Indiscriminate use of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides could cause adverse changes in biological balance as well as lead to an increase in the incidence of cancer and other diseases, through the toxic residues present in the grains or other edible parts. Unscientific tapping of underground water would lead to the rapid exhaustion of this wonderful capital resource left to us through ages of natural farming.
Sharma added that even today the solution suggested by policy makers to solve the environmental crisis brought about by the Green Revolution is more Green Revolution. “All these new technologies such as genetically modified crops have the potential to lead us down the same rabbit hole where the Green Revolution had taken us before. But our policymakers are paying no heed. It was a similar state of affairs then too.”
For Sharma, Swaminathan’s legacy is clear. “I remember being at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines when Dr Swaminathan was awarded the first World Food Prize. He received a letter from then UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. The letter described him as a ‘living legend’. There is no better description of him. And unfortunately, India did not do justice to the man, in my view.”
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