- Lived:
- born Kumbakonam, in the Tanjore district of the Madras Presidency (Tamil Nadu); the work happened in Delhi's wheat plots, the fields of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, Manila, and finally Chennai, where he died at 98
- Field:
- plant genetics — cytogenetics ripened into national food policy; principal Indian architect of the Green Revolution
- The Big Idea:
- Famine is not India's fate. A country that queued at the docks for American grain bred, demonstrated and priced its way to feeding itself within a single decade — and the same man who led it warned, before the celebration began, what the harvest would cost in soil and water.
- In their words:
- "Exploitive agriculture offers great dangers…" — the opening of the warning he delivered to the Indian Science Congress in January 1968, months before anyone had coined the words "Green Revolution"
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who ended the age of Indian famine was also the first man to publish the bill for it — and he spent the second half of his life trying to get the country to read both columns of his own ledger.