The Silverfish

The archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, is among the few repositories featuring a collection of papers from notable Indian scientists. In 2023, my research on radioisotopes and their research applications led me to the Archives at NCBS to consult the papers of Dr M.S. Swaminathan, who is widely hailed as the progenitor of India’s “Green Revolution”. The collection broadly comprises Dr Swaminathan’s official correspondence, scientific papers, newspaper clippings and photographs. In this short feature, I wish to narrate the saga of “atomic agriculture” based on insights I drew from this collection.

Among his many distinctions, Dr Swaminathan was a quintessential “scientist-diplomat”. His records at the NCBS archives were a gateway to understanding the global agricultural context of the 1950s and 60s. With the onset of the atomic age in the 1940s, agricultural scientists in the Western world started using radioisotopes to tinker with natural evolution paths. As Cold War politics cast a shadow on scientific cooperation, newly independent countries like India were anxious about scientific secrecy and its impacts on the country’s development. 

In 1953, the revival of the spirit of international scientific cooperation through President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative marked a new era in the history of atomic science. Developing countries like India particularly expressed a keen interest in using nuclear techniques in agriculture to improve agricultural productivity and address acute food shortages. Dr Swaminathan led this research with great vigour, inducing new epistemic and policy directions in Indian agriculture research.

From participating in the International Conference on Radioisotopes held by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in September 1957 and the Second Geneva Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in September 1958, Dr Swaminathan had an early encounter with atomic agriculture in his career. For nearly three decades, Dr Swaminathan actively worked with the UN agencies, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), securing international assistance and research contracts for Indian institutions. While the historiography of Indian agriculture has widely recorded Dr Swaminathan’s institutional contributions, his scientific work on nuclear techniques has surprisingly remained understudied. Perusing his papers was thus a rare opportunity to map the technopolitical trajectory of atomic energy applications and bridge the historical gap in agricultural research.

The pursuit of nuclear techniques in agriculture was also rooted in postcolonial India’s aspiration to become a modern science and technology state. Besides promising freedom from hunger and famines, the atomic energy applications were critical to bringing agriculture research on par with global standards. Irradiating plants and seeds to breed “mutant” varieties was akin to “man-made evolution” that Dr Swaminathan pursued with great vigour. 

The (theoretical) possibility of inducing desired genetic changes through irradiation led to the establishment of the so-called “Atomic Garden” at the Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi. Through extensive studies and experiments, the IARI successfully bred varieties of cereals, including the celebrated “Sharbati Sonora” wheat variety.

Under Dr Swaminathan’s stewardship, the IARI forged a long-term collaboration with the Joint IAEA-FAO division on food and agriculture in plant mutations, tracer techniques and nutrition. These advances led the IARI to conduct training programs for scientists from South and Southeast Asian countries. To expand the scope of radiation applications in India, the IAEA offered a USD 2 million grant under the United Nations Special Fund (UNSF) to set up a specialised Nuclear Research Laboratory (NRL) at IARI. 

The use of radiation breeding, nevertheless, also had its skeptics globally. The scientific debate and controversy around mutant research also impacted Dr Swaminathan, as we can discern from his papers and help us make sense of the technopolitical context of radiation research in peculiar domestic and global settings. At a time when India was suffering from acute food shortages, nuclear techniques became critical in the country’s quest to modernise agriculture. Under Dr Swaminathan’s stewardship, India would lead the way by becoming a “standard-bearer” of atomic agriculture in the developing world.