The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Cradle of India’s Green Revolution languishes without a head
The country’s premier farm research and education institute has not had a full-time director for much of the present government’s tenure
ADMINISTRATIVE APATHY
IN ABOUT a month’s time, Indian farmers are going to harvest their wheat crop that will mark the 50th year of the Green Revolution. The 1966-67 rabi season was when they first undertook large-scale planting of the new ‘miracle’ high-yielding varieties on some 2,40,000 hectares. Key to the revolution was the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), whose scientists developed the package of practices for cultivation of the semidwarf wheat lines, initially imported from Mexico before breeding their own improved varieties, starting with Sonalika and Kalyan Sona in 1967.
That very IARI today is without a regular director. It has, in fact, been without one for a good part of over two-and-a-half years. The last director to have served a full term, H S Gupta, retired on August 7, 2014. It took more than a year to appoint a successor. But even the new director Trilochan Mohapatra, who joined on August 28, 2015 — he previously headed the Central Rice Research Institute at Cuttack, Odisha — was around for barely six months. On February 22, 2016, Mohapatra became director-general of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). IARI has been headless since then.
“It reflects the neglect by the authorities of an institution that has contributed so much to our farmers. That this is happening when we are celebrating the golden jubilee of the Green Revolution makes it even more unfortunate,” says Vijay Pal Singh, former programme leader (rice) at IARI and breeder of Pusa-1121, the blockbuster basmati variety that generates around $3 billion in annual export revenues for the country.
From Kalyan Sona and Sonalika in the mid-sixties, IARI scientists went on to develop similarly successful wheat varieties such as HD-2285 (released for commercial cultivation in 1982), HD-2329 (1985), HD2967 (2011) and HD-3086 (2014). While Kalyan Sona and Sonalika raised the wheat yield potential that many farmers harvested from 10-15 quintals to 45-50 quintals per hectare, these rose further to over 70 quintals with HD-2967 and HD-3086. The last two varieties would cover an estimated 14 million hectares or nearly half of the total area planted to wheat in India this year!
But wheat apart, IARI’S research fields have produced a host of widely-cultivated varieties also in rice (Pusa Basmati-1, Pusa44, Pusa-1121 and Pusa-1509), mustard (Pusa Bold, Pusa Jaikisan, Pusa Mustard-25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30), chana (BG-256 and BG362), vegetables (Pusa Ruby tomato, Pusa Purple Long brinjal and Pusa Sawani okra), and mango (Mallika and Amrapali). More recent breakthroughs include Pusa Double Zero Mustard-31 (the first ever ‘canola-grade’ mustard containing low levels of erucic acid and glucosinolates) and Pusa Arhar-16 (a promising early-maturing pigeon-pea that can yield 20 quintals per hectare in just 120 days and is, moreover, amenable to mechanical combine harvesting).
Significantly, all this is from an institution with an annual budget of just over Rs 400 crore, which also covers salaries and other establishment expenses. “There aren’t many research organisations in India that have had such a tangible impact on the ground with so little investment,” claims Singh, whose breeding accomplishments in basmati rice won him the Padma Shri award in 2012.
IARI’S bane has been the overbearing control — on everything from administration and appointments to funding, travel and research collaboration approvals — imposed by ministers, bureaucrats and scientist-administrators sitting in Krishi Bhawan. Such direct involvement from the Agriculture Ministry may not have mattered during the Green Revolution period, when the person at the helm, Chidambaram Subramaniam, was somebody who knew the subject well and, equally important, had a direct line with the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi.
“Wewerelivingship-to-mouththosedays and everybody recognised the importance of investing in agricultural research. A lot of attentionwas,therefore,paidtoinstitutionssuch as IARI and it continued even in the decades thatfollowed.nowonder,wehadsuchillustrious directors, be it B P Pal, M S Swaminathan, A B Joshi, H K Jain and S K Sinha or R B Singh and S Nagarajan,” notes Singh.
According to him, things have changed in the last few years, when agriculture itself has ceased to be a priority amongst policymakers and “we think we have become self-sufficient”. That has bred not just complacency, but even negligence, manifested in India’s premier national institute for agricultural research and education not having a full-time director. The Indian Agricultural Research Institute currently has Jeet Singh Sandhu, deputy director-general (crop science) of ICAR, holding additional charge as its director. Prior to him, the officiating director was Ravinder Kaur, an agricultural physicist who heads IARI’S water technology centre.
“The director of IARI should be someone with a good understanding of soil and water, besides biochemistry, genetics and breeding, plant pathology and entomology. I hope the government make the right choice and it is done soon. The present situation is sending a negative message to the younger generation of scientists,” adds Singh.
Many eminent farm scientists, both past and serving, The Indian Express spoke to felt that the time had come to insulate both IARI and its parent organisation ICAR from political/bureaucratic interference by bringing them under the direct charge of the Prime Minister.
“This is the case with the Indian Space Research Organisation, Department of Atomic Energy, and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Transferring administrative authority from Krishi Bhawan to the Prime Minister’s office will make ICAR/IARI less vulnerable to ministerial whims and day-to-day interference. Moreover, it will help raise the profile of agricultural research to the level of space and atomic energy, while protecting the autonomy of institutions like IARI,” they point out.