Surinder Sud: From horse breeding to satellite imagery

The Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) is celebrating its centenary this year. But it actually came into being nearly 208 years ago, in 1797, as a horse breeding station of the East India Company at a remote Bihar village called Pusa, located on the bank of River Gandak.

The company needed well-bred horses for its officers to move about but the avian breeders went a step further and began working on horse fodder, too.

They introduced the oats crop for this purpose in 1807. It was only after the advent of the railways that horse breeding became irrelevant, which gave way to work on other disciplines of agriculture.

It was converted into a full-fledged farm research institute in 1905 by Lord Curzon, the then Viceroy of India, to undertake systematic scientific research on agriculture to avert frequently occurring famines.

The establishment of this Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa, was facilitated also by the generous donation of £30,000 by an American philanthropist Henry Phipps after whom the main building in Pusa was named.

The shifting of the IARI to its present home in Delhi was necessitated by the disastrous earthquake of 1934 in north Bihar, which created two wide and deep fissures running along the length of the Pusa institute building, cutting it into two irreparably damaged wings.

The foundation of the building was also damaged and had begun to sink.

Indeed, by then the IARI had earned itself a reputation not only within the country but abroad, too, despite its location in a remote village.

So much so that the choice of an alternative site became a major controversy and a matter of intense public debate in those days. While the opinion among scientists was divided on its relocation near the national capital, the provincial governments were lobbying for it to be moved to one of their towns.

Current Science, a science journal of international repute, carried a cover story on IARI's relocation in its August 1934 issue. It pointed out: "The controversy has indeed assumed such serious proportions that not a day passes without some communication to the press "" an important interview, resolution passed at a public meeting or proceedings of a lively discussion at a council of legislatures."

The journal also commented dispassionately on the merits and demerits of various alternative locations for this institute. These included Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Lahore, Calcutta, Patna, Allahabad, Agra and others.

One of the points that disfavoured Delhi as the new home "" apart from the political temperature of the city "" was the lack of scientific environment in the capital.

"The colleges in Delhi have, unfortunately, very few facilities for scientific research," the journal said.

However, as could be expected, Delhi was the ultimate winner and the institute was moved to a sprawling 1,000-acre valley towards the fag end of the Aravalli foothills, west of the new capital township of New Delhi.

The land had typical Indo-Gangetic soil and belonged largely to Todapur and adjoining villages, though some of it was a part of the cantonment.

The present campus of the institute was constructed between 1934 and 1936, and was formally inaugurated by Viceroy Linlithgow.

Once established, there was no looking back for the IARI. Though it formally acquired a deemed university status only in 1958, it had started post-graduate agriculture education way back in 1923, and gave its own certificates.

Even before the advent of the green revolution, the institute had bred some of the globally-acclaimed varieties of wheat, including NP4, and sugarcane (at its Coimbatore research centre).

It maintained the country's best herd of the Sahiwal breed of cattle. Its botany division had built a living collection of indigenous and exotic varieties and related species of a large number of crop plants.

The entomology division housed one of the largest insect collections.

Indeed, the seed of the green revolution was sown in 1962 when Nobel Laureate Norman E Borlaug developed the high-yielding dwarf wheat plants and gave some of them to India for trial.

This genetic material was shared by the IARI with agricultural universities at Pantnagar and Ludhiana, facilitating the development of India-specific wheat varieties that triggered the green revolution.

IARI's wheat breeder late V S Mathur was quick to churn out several suitable wheat varieties for sustaining the green revolution. The two universities, too, bred useful varieties.

Interestingly, though Borlaug had given his wheat material simultaneously to Pakistan too, they took several years to capitalise on it for lack of scientific manpower and institutional facilities like the ones available at the IARI, Pantnagar or Ludhiana.

Of course, the vital support by the policymakers also made a difference.

The IARI can take legitimate pride in replicating the success achieved in wheat breeding in other crops, too, including rice. Today, 70 per cent of the improved varieties of wheat, aromatic rice, bajra, gram and mustard and over 50 per cent of other crops, including vegetables and fruits, owe their origin to the IARI.

Thus, the IARI has acted as a mother institution not only for crop breeding and supportive technology generation, but also for developing scientific agricultural human resource.

Many of the country's top farm scientists, including M S Swaminathan, R S Paroda and the present IARI Director S Nagarajan, are alumni of the IARI.

Many of the winners of the World Food Award (equivalent to the Nobel prize in other sciences), too, are alumni of this institute. The IARI library holds south Asia's largest collection of agro-biological literature.

Significantly, the IARI invariably kept pace with the changing times and has often managed to remain ahead of it. As such, it was the first institution in the country to set up a department of biotechnology way back in 1985.

It also established a department of environment about 15 years ago and a water technology centre even earlier.

The IARI pioneered the use of neem as a biopesticide and developed a neem-based regulator of fertiliser nitrogen utilisation by the plants. It introduced, in collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organisation, the use of aerial imagery for monitoring the spread of plant diseases.

Satellite-aided remote sensing and simulation technologies are now being applied for natural resource management.

In its bid to keep ahead in this race against time, the IARI has now re-prioritised its research efforts, giving it the much needed market orientation.

For this, it has begun work on improving the competitiveness of the Indian agricultural products through higher unit productivity, and consumer demand-driven product quality.

It will henceforth evolve plant types and varieties amenable to mechanised farm operations. And considering the growing significance of information and communication technology, the IARI intends to gainfully exploit the potential of this technology for public good.

This apart, it is seeking to address sustainability issues that have assumed far greater relevance now, than ever in the past. "The future agriculture will be knowledge-based and technology-driven. The IARI is conscious of it and is working towards this end", maintains Nagarajan.