Swaminathan was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for generating a new confidence in the agricultural capabilities of the country.
Till the late fifties food production in the country was insufficient to meet its requirements. There was no solution in sight and even the future appeared bleak.
For Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, a young scientist at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, this was a challenge. After persistent research he felt that Noble Laureate N.E. Borlaug’s newly developed Maxican dwarf wheat variety could solve the wheat problem.
On Swaminathan’s initiative Borlaug visited India to study the situation and he provided a range of Mexican dwarf wheat varieties. They were found to be suitable for cultivation in this country and wheat production increased dramatically. Within a decade production had doubled. Like Pal before him Swaminathan is one of those responsible for the Green Revolution.
Swaminathan was born on August 7, 1925, at Kumbakonam and had his basic education in Tamil Nadu. He then went to Britain and took his Ph.D. from the School of Agricultural in Cambridge in 1952. He spent the next two decades doing research on various crops and in basic and applied genetics at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute. He developed high yielding strains of wheat and rice and accomplished difficult crosses in potato and jute species.
Swaminathan is an able administrator and social worker, a rare quality in a scientist. He has been formulating various schemes and projects to provide the benefits of research done in the laboratory to the farmer in the field. He has also introduced modern methods and techniques to raise agricultural production. In 1971 he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for generating a new confidence in the agricultural capabilities of the country. In 1973 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. He has also received the S.S. Bhatnagar Award, the Birbal Sahni Medal and the Mendel Memorial Award.
At present he is Director of the International Rice Research Institute, Phillipines.