A biography is often the most difficult form of book that any writer can attempt. This is because collecting the information he or she needs to write it forces the author to delve deep into the personality of the subject. But the deeper one goes into the subject’s life and personality, the more difficult does it become to retain one’s objectivity. Attempts to avoid this pitfall have turned more than one biography into a hagiography.In her book on the life and work of Dr M.S. Swaminathan (M.S. Swaminathan: The Man Who Fed India, Priyambada Jaykumar, Harper Collins), Priyambada Jaykumar has avoided this pitfall by achieving a balance between her affection for her subject and a dispassionate description of his life’s work. For her, striking this balance was essential because, as she candidly confesses, her father and Dr. Swaminathan’s wife Mina, were first cousins.M.S. Swaminathan: The Man Who Fed India by Priyambada Jaykumar, Harper Collins. Photo: https://harpercollins.co.in/She had therefore known ‘MS’ from her childhood. For any biographer, this can be a bonus as well as a trap. The author has avoided the latter by balancing her memories of him stretching back to childhood, with a meticulous examination and presentation of his work and achievements. This has resulted in a biography that not only highlights the selfless passion that drove Swaminathan to achieving what he did, but also brings him to life almost as a member of one’s own family as one turns page after riveting page.This book is as much a memoir as a biography, so there are no sharp divisions in it between Swaminathan’s personal and working life. But it falls broadly into four sections that correspond with the four phases of Swaminathan’s long and productive life. These are i) his studentship and specialisation in agricultural genetics; ii) Twenty-five years at the India Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), from till 1979, the last seven as its Director; iii) his six years as Director General of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and his final years creating the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai.Swaminathan began by studying for a BA degree in zoology and intended to follow his father into Medicine, but upon witnessing, and experiencing the horror of the Bengal famine that killed an estimated four million people he decided, somewhat to the consternation of his family, that he would study agriculture.He did so first in the Agricultural College at Coimbatore, and from 1947 to 1949 at the then newly established Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in Delhi. But his future was decide when he received a UNESCO fellowship to study plant Genetics in Holland for the next academic year. Swaminathan jumped at it, and that changed his life.Upon his return, after a short period of unemployment, in March 1954 he was inducted by a former professor into the Central Rice Research Institute at Cuttack where he began his first studies of hybridising Indica varieties of Rice with the much shorter stemmed and higher yielding Japonica strains.His stay in Cuttack was short, however, because in October of the same year, he was selected to fill the post of a cytogeneticist at the IARI. The IARI remained his home for the next 25 years till, after a three-year stint as the Acting Deputy Chairman of India’s Planning Commission and principal secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, he was selected to become the Director of the International Rice Research Institution at Los Banos, in the Philippines. That began the third phase of his life , which lasted for five and a half years till January 1988.He returned to India and set up the Chennai-based M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in the same year. From there he directed continuing research into all forms of Agriculture and facets of rural life. His monumental contribution in this field was the four National Commission reports on farmers, that have become a blueprint for the future development of humane Agriculture in India.Swaminathan is rightly credited for being the father of the Green Revolution IndiaSwaminathan is rightly credited for being the father of the Green Revolution India. For it was he who first contacted Norman Borlaug, whom he had met earlier, when he heard that Borlaug had developed a dwarf, high yielding wheat variety for farmers in the USA.Borlaug had welcomed him, but had told him that the variant he had developed was of a winter wheat for the USA which might not succeed in India, and had pointed him in the direction of Mexico where scientists had developed dwarf varieties suited to warmer climates. That was where Sonora 64, and other varieties were brought to India from. These were then crossed with Japanese and indigenous wheat strains to give high yielding wheat variants that retained the golden colour and taste of indigenous wheat but yielded double or more of its grain.Developing a new variety of an existing crop is one thing; getting farmers who are naturally, and understandably, conservative to accept it is another. The author takes great pains to describe how Swaminathan , often accompanied by Borlaug, or other scientists, went from village to village, often field to field to persuade farmers to try out the new wheat varieties. It was this personal reassurance, almost amounting to a guarantee, that made the farmers in each of the villages they visited take up the new varieties.The rest is now history. 1966 was the year in which northern India suffered from its second, consecutive drought and Bihar, Eastern UP and parts of Bengal faced the prospect of a famine similar to the Bengal famine of 1943. But the famine did not take place. Mortality rates in Bihar in 1966-67 barely twitched upwards.A good part of the reason was PL480 wheat shipments from the USA. But an equally important contributor was the jump in wheat production that began in the winter of 1966. India’s production of wheat jumped from 6 million tonnes in 1965-66 to 11.8 million tonnes in 1966-67, and to 24 million tonnes in 1967-68.Dramatic as they are, these figures tell us only half the story. The Bengal famine killed close to 4 million people because when the rains failed in 1942, there was no rabi wheat crop in Eastern India that could provide a backstop of employment and sustenance to the landless poor during the winter of 1942-spring 1943.So the next time they could earn wages in cash or kind to feed themselves lay a full 12 months in the future. The wheat revolution ended this dependence on a single crop, and lifted the ever-present spectre of famine resulting from monsoon failure that had loomed over India since the beginning of time.That is the reason why Indians think of the Green Revolution mostly in terms of the breakthrough in the production of wheat. To this writer, however, Swaminathan’s greater contribution was the IARI’s fathering of the Green revolution in rice. The reason is that Rice is a highly photosensitive crop, whose period of maturity and yield are determined by the amount of sunlight it receives.Since rice, unlike wheat, is grown all over the country from Kerala till Kashmir, the sunlight it receives varies enormously . The rice varieties grown in the country reflect this variation. So when the IARI scientists began to develop high yielding varieties by crossing various Indica and Japonica strains of paddy they had this additional hurdle to cross.To do so, after scores of field tests the IARI developed no fewer than 140 combinations of seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, each most suited to a particular part of the country. That was the colossal effort that brought about the Green Revolution in Paddy. It raised the output of rice from an average of 37 million tonnes in 1969-72 to 89 million tonnes in 1999-2000.In the same period the area under paddy cultivation rose only from 37.6 million hectares to 44.5 million hectares. In 2023-24 the production of rice reached 137 million tonnes with almost no further increase in the acreage under paddy.The author’s description of the extraordinary role Swaminathan played, as the Director General of the International Rice Research Institute, in reviving the war-destroyed agricultural economies of South-east Asia, notably those of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but also the agro-economies of Madagascar, Egypt, North Korea, and the Philippines among other nations is illuminating.Coming on top of his central role in creating the Green Revolution in India, these earned him the World Food Prize, which was instituted by Norman Borlaug when the Nobel committee staunchly refused to consider agriculture a sufficiently important subject to merit a Nobel prize of its own.Her description of Swaminathan’s final decades in Chennai, his creation of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation and the way he used it to continue his battle for a better, more secure life for the farmers of India, particularly the women who do the heavy lifting in agriculture, is suffused with tenderness and affection. It is these final pages of the book that make it special in the realm of biographies.Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist and commentator.