He is to rice what Norman Borlaug, the ‘Father of the Green Revolution’, was to wheat. But Gurdev Singh Khush – no meals crop in historical past has been planted in as a lot space worldwide as his blockbuster IR36 and IR64 varieties – the least amongst rice breeders.
For starters, pleased rice eaters aren’t a lot: “I prefer wheat and chapatis any day”. This makes him very like the ‘Milkman of India’, Verghese Kurien, who merely disliked milk and will by no means drink it. More pertinent, nonetheless, is that Khush did not really see paddy fields till he got here to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baos, Philippines, as a 32-year-old. That was on the finish of July 1967.
87-year-old GS Khush (heart) with 94-year-old agricultural economist Sardara Singh Johal (proper) and 85-year-old farmer Mohinder Singh Dosanjh at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana in August 2022. (Express / Source)
As the eldest son of farmer Kartar Singh – he was a Jat Sikh of Roorki village of Phillaur tehsil of Jalandhar district of Punjab – Khush, born on August 22, 1935, had solely maize, wheat, moong (inexperienced gram) and mash ( Black gram) remembers. They are being grown on 15 acres of land. The 87-year-old, who had just lately come to attend his alma mater Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), says, “Rice was a minor crop in Punjab, cultivated in low-lying areas alongside rivers. and was meant for personal consumption solely.” Two Day Seminar on ‘Transforming India’s Green Revolution Hub’. Its focus was on improvements in plant breeding and insurance policies to advertise crop diversification and sustainable farming in Punjab.
The report of “not seeing rice” via his major training at Khalsa High School in Bundala, which was about 7 km on foot, additionally continued at Government Agricultural College, Ludhiana. Khush graduated from this institute (which turned PAU in 1962) in June 1955. His good marks led him to pursue a PhD on the University of California, Davis (UCD) to pursue a Master of Science with half-time help. ,
Rye and Tomatoes
Khush’s PhD analysis was on rye, a grain intently associated to wheat and barley. His thesis challenge included “Investigation of the genetic similarity between cultivated rye and wild species”. Shortly after its completion in July 1960, he was provided a post-doctoral place by Charles M. Rick, the world-renowned authority on tomato biology, as an assistant geneticist in UCD’s Department of Vegetable Crops. For the following seven years, Khush’s work was on mapping and discovering the genome of the tomato – “all 12 of its chromosomes”.
GS Khush (proper) with World Bank President Robert McNamara (second from left) and IRRI Director Robert Chandler (left) in 1971. (Express/Source)
So, how did he find yourself in Rice?
It was somewhat unintended. In August 1966, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) director Robert F. Chandler invitations Khush to hitch the six-year-old establishment. Chandler had beforehand visited UCD and was searching for a shiny younger plant breeder to work at IRRI. Within a 12 months, Khush joined IRRI, the place he would spend most of his subsequent 34.5 years: “I became a rice breeder because everyone at IRRI worked on rice!”
Working within the rice paddies was completely different from that of the tomato, the place he might sit close to the vegetation and make crosses within the area. With Rice, they needed to be taught to “carefully remove plants from dirty fields, put them in pots and bring them to a greenhouse or covered shed to form crosses”.
miraculous varieties
In November 1966, even earlier than Khush joined, IRRI launched IR8. This “miracle rice”, a cross between a Chinese dwarf paddy Dee-jiao-woo-jen and a tall vigorous Indonesian selection Peta, was developed by two IRRI breeders Henry M. Beechel and Peter Jennings. The conventional tall varieties had vegetation that had been 150-cm-plus-high with weak stems. When fertilizers had been utilized, the mass grew vertically and bent (“entered”). In addition, they produced about 30% grain and 70% straw, and matured in 160–180 days. Farmers might harvest solely 1-3 tonnes of paddy (rice with husk) per hectare.
GS Khush with IR8 rice breeder Henry Beechel (left) at IRRI’s Grain Quality Laboratory in 1968. (Express/Source)
In distinction, IR8 had vegetation that had been barely 95 cm tall and had robust stems that didn’t survive if extremely fertilized. Their grain-straw ratio was 50:50, with solely 130 days to maturity. Paddy yield was 4.5-5 t/ha with minimal fertilizers and may go as much as 9-10 t with larger software. KN Ganesan, a farmer from Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, named his son Erettu (IR-ettu; ‘ettu’ is 8 in Tamil).
IR8 was, nonetheless, inclined to ailments (bacterial blight, blast fungus, tungro and grass stunt viruses) and bug pests (brown plant hopper, gall midge and stem borer). Its grains have chalky (opaque areas resulting in undesirable look and elevated breakage throughout milling) and excessive amylose content material (inflicting drying and hardening upon cooking). This is the place the varieties produced by Khush, particularly the IR36 and IR64, impressed everybody.
Varieties of miraculous pleased.
IR8 was a easy cross between a Chinese and Indonesian selection. IR36 descended from at the very least six crosses, considered one of which concerned IR8. In whole, it contained genes from 14 indigenous land species from six nations (India: 4, China: 4, Philippines: 3, Indonesia: 1, Bangladesh: 1 and Japan: 1) and one wild rice species (Oryza nivara). There had been 4 Indian landraces every from Pattambi (Thekkan and Eravapandi) of Kerala and Tamil Nadu (Kichilli samba and Vellaikar).
The goal behind such complicated breeding was to develop rice varieties that weren’t solely excessive yielding, but additionally included genes from numerous land and wild breeding, conferring resistance to a broad spectrum of pests and ailments. IR36 scored larger than IR8 for its even shorter length of 111 days, mixed with one other breeding goal – to allow farmers to develop two rice crops per 12 months. IR36 was launched in May 1976 and in the course of the Eighties 11 million hectares (mh) had been planted yearly. No selection – of any meals crop, not simply of rice – had ever occupied a lot territory earlier than.
IR36 was adopted by one other blockbuster selection in May 1985. IR64 had genes from 20 landraces from eight nations, yielded larger than each IR8 and IR36, and had a number of illness and pest resistance. But its specialty was the standard of the grains: that they had an intermediate amylose content material and gelatinization temperature, leading to a softer texture and higher palatability of cooked rice. The restoration of rice from the grounded paddy was additionally larger. IR64, by the late Nineteen Nineties, had elevated by greater than 10 mh yearly: 6 mh in Indonesia and three mh in India alone.
starvation fighter
Khush joined IRRI as a breeder and retired as one in February 2002, exhibiting little curiosity in administrative positions. Under his management – he was formally the top of IRRI’s Department of Plant Breeding, Genetics and Biochemistry – a complete of 328 rice breeding strains in 75 nations had been launched as 643 varieties. Several of those, together with IR42 and IR72, had been broadly planted. Between 1966 and 2000, international rice manufacturing elevated by 133.5% (from 257 million to 600 million tons), with space rising by solely 20.6% (from 126 to 152 MH). In 2002 an estimated 60% of the world’s rice space was planted for IRRI-bred varieties or their offspring.
It is no surprise, then, that the good agricultural scientist MS Swaminathan described Khush as “a leading world hunger fighter and an icon in rice research”. Rice, by the way, is the staple meals for greater than half of the world’s inhabitants, offering one-fifth of the worldwide per capita caloric consumption. Beechel and Khush had been collectively awarded the World Food Prize in 1996 for his or her rice breeding work, “which contributed to ensuring that growing populations in Asia and around the world would be supported by an adequate food supply”.
dwelling connection
None of Khush’s well-known kinds of rice had been grown in Punjab, though he provided seeds from IRRI’s breeding strains with the lengthy skinny grains that buyers there preferred. One of those strains was chosen and launched by the PAU in 1976 as PR-106, a preferred selection that has lined three-fourths of the state’s rice space for greater than three many years. IR36 and IR64 planted principally in japanese, central and southern India.
“The IRRI varieties were developed in a tropical environment and were not adapted to the temperate climate of Punjab,” says Khush. In addition, he believes that the world underneath rice in Punjab needs to be “progressively reduced”. While water-saving DSR (Direct Seed Rice) applied sciences and rising shorter length varieties might help, it’s not sufficient. Part of the paddy space needs to be changed with oilseeds and different crops. The authorities ought to “give some subsidy to encourage farmers to switch” [alternative] crops”.
Khush, now assistant professor emeritus at UCD, has not forgotten his roots. Before the pandemic, Khush used to come back and go to Roorkee virtually yearly. His youthful brother Kripal Singh Coonar nonetheless lives there. Khush’s different two brothers additionally use the Jats’ gotra (clan) ‘Koonar’ as their final names: “I wrote poetry in Punjabi at school and determined to provide myself Takhllus (identify de guerre). He values The identify taken (pleased or pleased) turned my final identify.
Khush was destined to be completely different – and pleased.
With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
