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Chapter 1
Introduction
I was pleased to accept the responsibility of writing the biography of Professor M.S. Swaminathan FRS, the first Laureate of the World Food Prize and internationally acclaimed crusader of a âZero Hungerâ world, with humility in my heart and a feeling of inadequacy to do a befitting job. I am like a village rustic amazed at the great intellect of the village schoolmaster. The relevant part of the poem âThe Village Schoolmasterâ by Oliver Goldsmith comes to my mind.
While words of learned length and thundâring sound
Amazed the gazing rustics rangâd around;
And still they gazâd and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew
However, Oliver Goldsmith would surely have known that the rustics too imbibed some of the great intellectual capacity of the village schoolmaster due to their long association with him and that indeed is also the case with me while venturing to write Swaminathanâs biography. Yet, Swaminathan despite his immense knowledge and ocean of experience has maintained deep affection for the humanity and the spirit to share his achievements with all, especially the least gifted.
The uniqueness of Professor Swaminathanâs approach is that he pays concurrent attention to all the dimensions of sustainable development. The important dimensions of sustainable development are ecological, social and economic. It is also necessary that sound basic research in Life Sciences is essential to integrate social and economic components for inter-disciplinary, problem-oriented approach to solving contemporary social problems, particularly poverty, hunger, malnutrition and the resultant deprivation and violence. His fight against poverty and hunger using appropriate science and technology started in the 1950s. In fact, Mahatma Gandhi visiting Kumbakonam and staying at his residence when he was only about 6 years old had left an indelible impression on him. As one of his biographers, Dil [1] writes, Swaminathan has been greatly influenced by Gandhijiâs concept of sarvodaya (advance of all at all levels) and antyodaya (starting with the poorest person in the society). Having worked with Professor Swaminathan initially as a student in the 1960s and thereafter having greatly benefited from his knowledge and guidance for over four decades, also endorse the statement by A. Dil.
There is ample justification for so many scientists and journalists for having written the biography of Professor M.S. Swaminathan [1â8] and for still many more eminent writers and publishers aspiring to write. In as much as he has changed the image of India which at the time of her independence and until about two following decades was a begging bowl to bread basket, he is surely worth a million biographies. Who else but M.S. Swaminathan could have been ranked in 1999 by Time Magazine (August 23, Asia edition) as one of the 20 most influential Asians of the 20th century alongside Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindra Nath Tagore from India in recognition of his outstanding service toward a hunger-free Asia. Who else would have been chosen and honoured as the âFirst World Food Prize Laureateâ for his fight against hunger and rural livelihoods. Which other âbiologistâ could have been elected in 2002 as the President of the Pugwash Conferences in Science and World Affairs, established by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell to bring peace to the world in the era of cold war and threat of nuclear weapons. Swiftly, Swaminathan, in his capacity as President of Pugwash Conferences, widened the scope of âthreatâ from just nuclear weapons to hunger and pandemic human diseases such as HIV, AIDS, T.B, etc. How true it is that with the overshoot of human ecological footprint, and progressive degradation of the ecological foundations of sustainable agriculture coupled with social and gender inequalities, the food and nutrition insecurity at the household level of over a billion people in the world is rapidly emerging as a far greater threat than nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Experience over several decades, at least since the beginning of the globalisation with its free but not fair trade, shows that accelerated economic growth is unlikely to rescue the planet and humanity which are already at the crossroads. Science-based technologies over the past two centuries have, no doubt, delayed the onset of the Malthusian scourge, but have at the same time caused monstrous scale of degradation of the finite resources, that the very survival of humans is now in jeopardy. In his foreword to Swaminathanâs book [9], Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York writes, the great agronomic successes since Malthusâ time, including the Green Revolution itself, have come at huge and sometime irreversible environmental costs. Even with all our technological wizardy, we have not yet conquered the Malthusian Challenge since we have not yet adopted a truly sustainable method of feeding the planet. After discussing problems and possible solutions, Professor Sachs concludes, Swaminathan brims with ideas, prescriptions, policy plans and experiments. He knows that we can meet the great sustainability challenges ahead, but only through tremendous will, scientific knowledge, ethical commitment and openness to partnerships and cooperation. It is a tall order, but Swaminathan has proved time and again that it can be done. Now it is the readerâs turn to benefit from this wisdom, experience and compassion.
Collapse of human civilisations through growing violence would precede mass exodus and mass extinctions as is now witnessed in the world today. All these had been foreseen by Swaminathan quite a few decades ago, and he noted that hunger and social deprivation are the major causes of violence. Quenching hunger and thirst would reduce violence and also open the eyes to the splendour of pluralism in arts, music, faith, culture, etc. The need in this regard is to understand and appreciate that the direction as well as the technologies would have to be drastically changed. It is as if the world knew that a few people can turn things around. They are the ones who would avoid highly invasive and harsh technologies which do no good to environment and to substantially large proportions of the humans, and instead, innovate eco-friendly and socially inclusive technologies to reconcile conservation and development. These are the few United Nations Jacques Cousteau Chair Professors of eco-technologies of which Swaminathan is the first among the equals. His vision of a Biovillage paradigm to conserve the natural resources and make sustainable use of them to create âon-farmâ and ânonfarmâ livelihoods with market linkages for income generation to reduce the rural poverty, and to increase access to food at the individual household level is also the pathway to biohappiness. No wonder that his intense love for the planet Earth and its humanity was fully recognised by the International Geographical Union presenting Swaminathan with the medal Planet and Humanity in 2000.
Swaminathanâs approach to tackling hunger problem and achieving âZero Hungerâ planet is evolutionary in one sense. Hunger has three dimensions, viz., caloric, protein and micronutrient. Of these, the caloric hunger requires most immediate attention as people without any food for several days would die of starvation. Lack of protein is a form of hunger that first results in debilitation which precedes and persists for a while before death. The âhidden hungerâ caused by lack of vitamins and micronutrients in the diet leads to morbidity and incapacity for productive work and life. About three decades ago, at the time he was making preparations to set up the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in 1988, his major focus was to enhance the access of the rural women and men to food, which in the nature of cereal grains was available in plenty in the country. It involved creating avenues for enhancing rural livelihoods. The cause of hunger was the lack of rural livelihoods to generate income and access to food. Over the next decade, he directed the MSSRF to launch what are called the Pulse villages. Pulse crops enrich the nitrate content of the soil with the help of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the root modules on one hand, and provide much-needed âproteinâ to the people on the other. Today, the world has woken up to this concept and the year 2016 has been declared as the International Year of the Pulses by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In the current decade, with the launch of the âZero Hungerâ programme by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2012, Professor Swaminathan has come up with a highly achievable yet remarkably simple approach to remedy the nutritional maladies with a farming system highly suitable for resource-poor small and marginal as well as smallholder family farms. He calls it the Farming System for Nutrition (FSN) that would include cultivating agri-horticultural crops rich in specific vitamins and micronutrients in the regions where particular micronutrient deficiency causes health impairment. Put in a simple way, it is the provision of agri-horticultural remedies to specific nutritional maladies.
Today, violence is growing in the hearts of people and terrorism is driving mass exodus of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., to Europe and other parts of the world. The consequences could lead to exacerbating the threat to the world peace, largely because of disruption in food production and access to food. Besides these political refugees, there are growing millions of environmental and climate refugees; feminisation of rural poverty is a growing social scourge. The human population explosion beyond the carrying capacity of any given region of Earth and the climate change-related sea level rise are accelerating âmass exodusâ of people from their native areas. Long before all these became a reality, Professor Swaminathan was able to comprehend the emerging scenario of challenges and threats and hence started developing sciencebased eco-technologies to mitigate the intensity of the strife and pangs of hunger. His setting up of MSSRF in Chennai in 1988 with the help of several prize monies he had won was towards the realisation of the principles of what he calls âDo Ecologyâ and transformation of exploitative path of development into a sustainable one. His major achievement in this regard is the transformation of the unsustainable (exploitative) âGreen Revolutionâ into an âEvergreen Revolutionâ in order to achieve productivity in perpetuity without accompanying environmental and social harm.
As of today, there are eight different biographies of Professor Swaminathan. The authors come from different parts of the world and with diverse backgrounds ranging from science to journalism [2, 4, 5]; in addition, a doctoral thesis for Ph.D. degree of the University of Madras has made an in-depth analyses of Swaminathanâs life from his childhood to his present roles in many spheres, mainly as the Founder-Chairman of MSSRF. The author, Parasuraman [6], was awarded the Ph.D. degree of the University of Madras. While Dr. Parasuraman wrote his doctoral thesis in Tamil, Erdelyi [3], a Hungarian journalist, wrote the biography of Professor Swaminathan under the title, The Man Who Harvests Sunshine â The Modern Gandhi: M.S. Swaminathan, in the Hungarian language. There is a reason for Mr. Andras Erdelyi to have referred to Professor Swaminathan as The Man who harvests sunshine. Mr. Erdelyi spent some time in MSSRF to collect material for the intended biography. I told Mr. Erdelyi that Professor Swaminathan had asked the architect of MSSRF building to make provision for harvesting sunshine and also rain water. The architect was apparently perplexed, and then Swaminathan explained that he meant making provisions in the top of the building for putting up solar panels for harvesting solar energy, and rooftop system for harvesting rain water and its collection in a sump. The biographer, Mr. Erdelyi, was so greatly impressed with the fact that Professor Swaminathan had thought of clean and renewable energy as well as rain water harvesting as early as 1980s when very few people subscribed to the need for clean renewable energy and rain water harvesting. This explains the reason for a rather uncommon and descriptive title of the biography. One other biography is in Marathi [8]. The biography entitled, Life and Work of M.S. Swaminathan: Toward a Hunger-Free World by Dil [1] is a product of extensive research and analyses of Professor Swaminathanâs life and memoir. Nevertheless, all the earlier eight biographies listed in the references at the end of Chapter 12 have not comprehensively dealt with his scientific vision right from the 1950s until now for achieving a hunger-free India and âZero Hungerâ world, while at the same time safeguarding the integrity of the ecological foundations of agriculture and harmony among humans.
All the earlier biographies [1â8] mention details of his early days in Kumbakonam (Tamil Nadu) where he was born on August 07, 1925 as the second child of Dr. M.K. Sambasivan and Parvathi Thangammal. Dr. Mankombu Krishna Sambasivan was an eminent Civil Surgeon and was also Municipal Chairman of Kumbakonam. His outstanding social contribution, apart from saving lives of patients, was the eradication of the mosquito species causing filariasis. His success was attributed to a combination of scientific techniques, social mobilisation and enhanced awareness. Such a dynamic person unfortunately died young at just 36 years of age. After the sad demise of Dr. Sambasivan, his three sons, viz., Krishnamurthy, Swaminathan and Ramdas, and his daughter Lakshmi came under the loving care of their uncle late M.K. Krishnaswamy, who for love and support, filled the void resulting from their fatherâs untimely death. Since other biographies, particularly those by Iyer [4] and Dil [1] have extensively covered all the essential particulars of Swaminathanâs college and university education, his marriage with Mina, (nee Mina Boothalingam) in 1955, their three daughters Soumya, Madhura and Nitya, the same are not repeated at length in this biography (Fig. 1.1).
Figure. 1.1. Professor Swaminathan with his wife Mina, and his daughters, Soumya, Nitya and Madhura (from left to right).
Therefore, the present biography analyses him more as a scientist and eco-technologist for his having achieved excellence in scientific research and teaching relevant to the social and global needs of the planet Earth which is now at the crossroads.
It is a general notion that scientists with international accolades (e.g. FRS, International Awards, etc.) and contributions worthy of Nobel Prize form a group of ivory tower Professors â secluded from fellow scientists with lesser accomplishments and the general public. However, Professor Swaminathan has been just the opposite of an ivory tower Professor readily lending access to every student, staff, fellow scientists and all other people at all times. A term such as peopleâs scientist would aptly describe him.
The other aspect of Professor Swaminathan is that he has neither been wedded to any particular technology or scientific paradigm nor divorced from any. To him, a technology is meant to solve a problem, if it can without causing harm to environment and health of all forms of life including humans. Most of his eight biographies [1â8] have rightly described him as an institution builder and it is equally important to emphasise that he had equipped every new institution he has built with the state-of-the-art instruments, gadgets and equipments. Yet, he had encouraged and nourished the development of ideas and mental capacity to realise the intended goal even without the sophisticated tools and instruments. He was so right when Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai developed âparallel processingâ to enhance speed and accuracy of computations, when super computers were denied by the super powers. Self-reliance is the key to sustainable development.
Planet Earth was already at the crossroads when he set up inter- and trans-disciplinary research programmes at MSSRF in 1988. As far as the science-based technologies for the rural areas are concerned, he blended the frontier technologies with traditional knowledge and ecological prudence of the rural and tribal people, particularly women. The resultant eco-technologies with their pro-nature, pro-poor, pro-women and prolivelihood orientation fulfil the ecological, economic and social needs of any sustainable development. While this motto of Professor Swaminathan is for technology development towards sustainable management of natural resources in the rural areas and creation of on-farm and non-farm livelihoods, changing the direction of scientific queries to provide solutions to the existing as well as emerging problems of the resource-poor small and marginal farms and farmers was also integrated in his programmes of social contract of science and technology. This reminds us of the old Chinese proverb that if we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.
His goal throughout the past 65 years of his journey in science has been to achieve a world that would not have any one of the three kinds of hunger viz., caloric, protein and micronutrient. There is no magic wand to achieve these; on the other hand, the use of technologies which are inherently invasive and harmful to the ecological foundations of sustainable agriculture needs to be prudently avoided or limited to situations of extreme necessities. Discretion, therefore, to weed out undesirable technologies, and promote only such technologies which would strengthen/ promote sustainable agriculture and rural development is highly essential. Unless this exercise is done before harnessing a technology, irreparable damage to environment and âlifeâ on Earth would be inevitable. It is indeed unique that Professor Swaminathanâs transformation of the âGreen Revolutionâ into âEvergreen Revolutionâ, and his concepts of âHalophyte Gardenâ, âRice Cultivation Below Sea Levelâ, etc., provide âdoableâ pathways to achieve sustainable agriculture and rural development even in an era of âglobal changeâ, of which climate change is an important integral. These are just a few examples of immensely vast approach to achieving âDo Ecologyâ of which he is the architect.
Ideas and adoption of simple tools have played a significant role in the evolution of humans from prehistoric times to the 21st century. Simple techniques often play major roles in changing human destiny. For example, I remember Professor Swaminat...
