MS Swaminathan’s evergreen revolution: Productivity without ecological harm

MS Swaminathan’s evergreen revolution: Productivity without ecological harm

Subject: Geography

Section: Economic geography

Context:

• The legendary agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan passed away on September 28 after turning 98 on August 7.
• He was known as the father of the Green Revolution in India.

About M. S. Swaminathan (7 August 1925 – 28 September 2023):

• In 1954 he joined the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) at New Delhi as an assistant cytogeneticist.
• He worked on potato genetics and breeding of frost- and disease-resistant varieties.
• He was an Indian agronomist, agricultural scientist, plant geneticist, administrator, and humanitarian.
• Swaminathan’s collaborative scientific efforts with Norman Borlaug saved India and Pakistan from certain famine-like conditions in the 1960s.
• His leadership as director general of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines was instrumental in his being awarded the first World Food Prize in 1987, recognized as one of the highest honors in the field of agriculture.
• The United Nations Environment Programme has called him “the Father of Economic Ecology”.

Development of semi-dwarf variety of wheat:

• Traditional wheat varieties were tall and slender. Their plants grew to 4.5-5 feet height with long and weak stems. They “lodged” or bent over, even falling flat on the ground.
• He wanted to develop a non-lodging variety which could “tolerate” higher fertilizer doses.
• Mutagenesis– A process of exposing plants to radiation to introduce desirable modifications in their DNA.
• Norin-10 (a semi-dwarf wheat variety from Japan) was cross-pollinated with locally-grown US wheat resulting in the wheat variety named ‘Gaines’.
• Norin-10, when crossed with the spring wheats grown in Mexico, resulting in high-yielding varieties incorporating the dwarfing genes of Norin-10 in a spring wheat background — Sonara 63, Sonora 64, Mayo 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A — were better suited for cultivation in India.
• These Mexican wheat varieties were cultivated in India that led to the success of the green revolution.
• Indian scientists later bred their own Kalyansona and Sonalika wheat varieties. These produced amber-coloured grain with better chapati-making quality than the imported red wheats.

Key scientific terms associated with Dr. M.S. Swaminathan’s research and Green Revolution

Green Revolution:

• A period of rapid, scientific agricultural advancement in the mid-1960s that involved growing a high-yielding, disease-resistant variety of wheat, primarily in Punjab, was the beginning of India’s Green Revolution.
• Key architect: Dr. Swaminathan, former Union Agriculture Ministers C. Subramaniam (1964-67) and Jagjivan Ram (1967-70 and 1974-77).
• Short-straw or dwarf varieties of crops like rice and wheat formed the basis of India’s Green Revolution. Dwarf strains have a higher Harvest Index, which means that the plant puts more of its energy resources into seeds rather than leaves or other plant structures.
• Harvest Index quantifies the crop yield in comparison to the total biomass produced.

HYV crops:

• High-yielding varieties of crops, or HYVs, produced a higher yield of crop per hectare in comparison to traditional variants. HYVs are usually disease-resistant and have a higher tolerance to conditions like drought.
• IR8, a variety of rice developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and first introduced in the Philippines, could produce as much as seven tonnes of rice per hectare.

Yield gap:

• The difference between the potential or maximum achievable yield of a crop and the actual realised yield for a given area is called the yield gap.

Cytogenetics:

• Cytogenetics is the study of chromosomes (DNA-carrying structures) and how they relate to hereditary characteristics and traits. Identifying traits such as resistance to diseases, drought, and pests in crops are applications of cytogenetics.

Hexaploid wheat:

• Scientifically known as Triticum aestivum, hexaploid wheat contains six sets of chromosomes and is among the most widely cultivated cereal crops across the world. It is also called “bread wheat”. Dr. Swaminathan is associated with research on the cytogenetics of hexaploid wheat.

Carbon fixation:

• Carbon fixation is the process by which crops capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into organic compounds like sugars and starches, mostly through photosynthesis.
• Grass species either use C3 or C4 classes of photosynthetic pathways for carbon fixation. The C3 pathway, also called the Calvin cycle, is slower in comparison to C4 – also called the Hatch and Slack pathway.
  • C4 occurs in both mesophyll cells and bundle sheath cells, making photosynthesis more efficient.
• Research on the C4 rice plant was started at the IRRI when Dr. Swaminathan was the Director General of the organization.

Evergreen revolution

The phrase “evergreen revolution” refers to long-term productivity growth that is not unhealthy to the environment or society. The Evergreen Revolution entails incorporating ecological principles into the development and dissemination of technology

Source: TH