In 1963 M. S. Swaminathan Helped Put 100 Kilograms of Mexican Wheat Seed Into Indian Trial Plots. By 1967-68 India's Wheat Output Was 16.5 Million Tonnes, Up From 12.3

In October 1963, about 100 kilograms of seed from four semi-dwarf Mexican wheats reached the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. Production figures from the Ministry of Agriculture, reproduced in the Reserve Bank of India’s Handbook of Statistics, show what the national totals did afterwards: 12.26 million tonnes of wheat in 1964-65 and 16.54 million tonnes in 1967-68.

The botanist who invited the plant breeder behind that seed to India, and then argued it onto farmers’ fields, was M. S. Swaminathan (1925 to 2023). This piece follows the seed, the officials who cleared its way, the numbers, and the bill that arrived later.

A dwarfing gene that travelled from Japan to Delhi

Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan was born on 7 August 1925 in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, the son of a physician. According to the Boston Globe’s obituary, he had hoped to become a doctor himself and turned to agriculture after the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed an estimated 3 million people. Our account of that famine covers the policy failures behind it. He studied in Tamil Nadu and the Netherlands, took a Cambridge doctorate in 1952, and turned down a professorship in the United States to come home, the Globe reports.

His wheat had a Japanese ancestor. CIMMYT, the Mexico-based wheat and maize research centre, says Gonjoro Inazuka crossed a semi-dwarf Japanese wheat with two American varieties in 1935 and produced Norin 10, which stood 60 to 110 centimetres tall against 150 for other wheats. Salmon, a US Department of Agriculture wheat breeder, carried samples to the United States. Orville Vogel at Washington State University used them to produce Gaines, the first of his semi-dwarf winter wheats.

Norman Borlaug, working in Mexico, asked Vogel for the dwarfing-gene seed after searching the USDA’s world wheat collection without success. He began crossing it into Mexican wheats in 1953, and his first attempt failed. By 1962 two Norin 10 descendants, Pitic 62 and Penjamo 62, were released for commercial production. CIMMYT says average yields in Mexico doubled within seven years of the semi-dwarf wheats being distributed.

Borlaug sent a few dozen seeds to India to test for rust resistance, and Swaminathan, then an adviser to the agriculture minister, wrote inviting him over, according to CIMMYT. Swaminathan’s own telling, given to an interviewer and republished by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), has the two meeting in July 1953 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with Borlaug touring India’s wheat regions in March 1963.

Four varieties made up the October 1963 seed: Sonora 63, Sonora 64, Mayo 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A. Harish Damodaran, who reconstructed the trials in the Review of Agrarian Studies, says the plants stood 2 to 2.5 feet tall against 4.5 to 5 feet for traditional Indian wheats, with stronger stems that resisted lodging, the toppling of a plant under its own grain, and responded to more fertiliser. Trial plots went in that November at Delhi, Ludhiana, Pantnagar, Kanpur and Pusa.

Two short harvests and a request to Congress

Then the harvests failed. In the Ministry of Agriculture series, total foodgrain output fell from 89.36 million tonnes in 1964-65 to 72.35 million in 1965-66, and wheat from 12.26 million tonnes to 10.40 million. Foodgrains recovered only to 74.23 million tonnes in 1966-67, and wheat to 11.39 million.

On 30 March 1966, President Lyndon Johnson told the US Congress that India needed at least 11 to 12 million tons of imported grain between January and December that year. Under its PL-480 programme the United States had supplied more than 6 million tons of wheat the year before, his message says. “India faces famine,” Johnson said. Jayakumar’s excerpt quotes Swaminathan on the same dependence: “Importing food is like importing unemployment.”

Our piece on the ship-to-mouth years covers the diplomacy and the new buying and pricing bodies. What follows adds the chain of people who got the seed into the ground.

The file Subramaniam cleared

C. Subramaniam was asked on 9 June 1964 to take over the food and agriculture ministries, according to an excerpt from Priyambada Jayakumar’s biography of Swaminathan published by Scroll. That August he called about twenty agricultural scientists to Krishi Bhawan and asked how they would end the shortage.

Swaminathan had a plan waiting. His earlier proposal for 1,000 national demonstrations of the new seed, at Rs 500 a hectare, had been blocked over money and doubts about the technology, Jayakumar writes, and Subramaniam cleared the file two days after Swaminathan presented it. Damodaran dates the proposal to June 1964 and the approval to August, and says Subramaniam overruled officials who doubted the need for demonstrations on that scale. In the ICAR reminiscence he remembers 500 demonstrations being approved. The sources differ on that number.

He wanted the demonstrations on the fields of poor farmers, so that a good yield would be credited to the plant type and not to a big landowner’s resources, according to both Damodaran and Jayakumar. About 15 farmers in Jaunti, a village in north-west Delhi, sowed Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A on about 70 acres in November 1964. Their target was 40 mun an acre (4 tonnes a hectare), against the 10 to 15 mun their tall wheats gave. Two farmers, including Bhoop Singh, harvested more than 45 mun.

Subramaniam brought in B. Sivaraman as agriculture secretary in May 1965, Jayakumar writes, a civil servant with field experience in agriculture and irrigation in Orissa.

18,000 tonnes in 1966, and the Indian varieties that replaced the Mexican ones

Full-scale sowing began in the 1966-67 winter (rabi) season, when, Damodaran writes, 18,200 tonnes of imported Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A seed were planted on 240,000 hectares. CIMMYT lists 18,000 tonnes for India, alongside about 42,000 for Pakistan and 22,000 for Turkey, though it dates those shipments to 1967, a year later than the Indian accounts. India imported the seed because farmer demand was very high, Swaminathan told ICAR.

He saw the import as a stopgap, a plan to “purchase time” in the words Damodaran quotes. His 1968 warning, also reported by Damodaran, was that high-yielding varieties grown in large blocks would become vulnerable to pests and diseases, so India needed an efficient seed multiplication system.

By 1967 Indian scientists had developed Kalyan Sona and Sonalika by careful selection from advanced Mexican breeding material, Damodaran writes. Their amber grain made better chapatis than the red grain of the original Mexican wheats.

Ministry data put wheat at 11.39 million tonnes in 1966-67 and 16.54 million in 1967-68, then 18.65 million tonnes in 1968-69, 20.09 million in 1969-70 and 23.83 million in 1970-71. For 2024-25, government data reported by PTI on 21 November 2025 put wheat at 117.94 million tonnes, against 113.29 million the year before.

The starting point is where accounts differ. His ICAR reminiscence says production went from 10 million tonnes to 17 million, and the Globe’s obituary repeats that for 1964 and 1968. For 1964-65 the same data give 12.26 million tonnes. Both end near 17 million tonnes.

Rangarajan notes that Borlaug later received the Nobel Peace Prize. Swaminathan recalled that Borlaug told him, “But for you, there would have been no Green Revolution in Asia.” That is Swaminathan’s report of what Borlaug said to him.

What the harvest cost

Some of these costs he raised himself. C. Rangarajan, a former Reserve Bank governor, notes that Swaminathan later cautioned against a “greed revolution” and coined “evergreen revolution” for productivity gains without ecological harm. Rangarajan also records that B. S. Minhas and T. N. Srinivasan questioned the fertiliser allocation and recommended doses in a 1966 article.

Prabhu Pingali’s 2012 review in PNAS gives the broader record. High-yielding wheat gave yield gains of 40 percent in irrigated areas and often no more than 10 percent in dry ones, he writes, and in South Asia the rain-fed areas were the slowest to benefit. Input subsidies “distorted incentives,” and staple-crop promotion crowded out pulses in India, with pulse consumption falling across income groups. Our piece on India’s diet and diabetes takes up the dietary side.

The water is the most measured cost. Punjab extracted 27.66 billion cubic metres of groundwater a year against an extractable resource of 17.63 billion, the Central Ground Water Board’s 2024 assessment says, a stage of extraction of 156.87 percent, with 115 of 153 assessment units, mostly blocks, classed as over-exploited. Haryana’s figures are 12.72 billion against 9.36 billion, 135.96 percent, with 88 of 143 units over-exploited. Any unit above 100 percent counts as over-exploited.

A satellite study by Matthew Rodell, Isabella Velicogna and James Famiglietti, published in Nature in 2009, estimated that groundwater under Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana, including Delhi, fell by the equivalent of 4.0 centimetres of water a year between August 2002 and October 2008, a net loss of 109 cubic kilometres. They called unsustainable use for irrigation the likely cause and noted that their record was brief.

PRS Legislative Research, in its 2024-25 analysis, says assured procurement mainly of wheat and rice may create excess supply, lower market prices and deplete groundwater, as in Punjab. Damodaran found a local case in Jaunti: groundwater below 100 feet and saline, wheat down to about a third of the winter cropped area, and farmers favouring vegetables.

The commission and the formula

The National Commission on Farmers was constituted on 18 November 2004 with Swaminathan as chairman, PRS records. It submitted four reports, in December 2004, August 2005, December 2005 and April 2006, and a final one on 4 October 2006. Among its recommendations were distributing ceiling-surplus land, cutting crop-loan interest to 4 percent simple, and wider crop insurance.

On prices, it said the minimum support price (the price at which the government stands ready to buy certain crops) should be “at least 50% more than the weighted average cost of production.” The phrase does not say which costs count. Costs usually enter through A2+FL, paid-out costs plus the value of unpaid family labour, which the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices uses when recommending support prices, PRS explains. C2 adds the rental value of owned land and interest on fixed capital.

Swaminathan told Hindustan Times, as Swarajya reported on 22 February 2018, “When we recommended 50 per cent over costs, we meant complete costs called C2, which includes all assumed costs.”

Budget 2018-19 announced support prices at one and a half times the cost of production. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said in Parliament on 9 February 2018 that this meant A2+FL, Outlook India reports. PRS’s table for 2023-24 shows what that does: the paddy price of Rs 2,183 a quintal was 1.5 times A2+FL and 1.1 times C2, and wheat at Rs 2,275 was 2.0 times A2+FL and 1.4 times C2.

A National Policy for Farmers, based on the commission’s draft, won government approval in 2007, R. V. Bhavani writes in the Review of Agrarian Studies. Bhavani also writes that fair and remunerative prices “remain a mirage.”

The last years

Swaminathan died on 28 September 2023 at his home in Chennai, aged 98, the Boston Globe reported, citing the research foundation he founded. Among those he credited, the Globe notes, were Subramaniam and Borlaug.