Harish Damodaran

New Delhi , March 14

WITH the Budget providing the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore an additional Rs 100 crore grant to make it a world-class university, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) is pitching for a similar status. The institute, a virtual breeding ground for the Green Revolution, is celebrating its centenary this year. It was originally set up in 1905 at Pusa (Bihar) before a devastating earthquake in 1934 prompted its relocation to Delhi. IARI attained its zenith in the late 1960s through the development of high-yielding wheat varieties such as Kalyansona, Sonalika and HD-2329.

The productivity breakthrough unleashed by these resulted in India producing more than 1,000 million tonnes of additional wheat during 1967-2004.

Fitting enough, the two key men who played handmaiden to this process — Dr Norman E. Borlaug and Dr M. S. Swaminathan — will be present at a three-day scientific convention that the institute is organising from Wednesday as part of its centenary celebrations. While the high point will be the 91-year-old Dr Borlaug's Coromandel Lecture `From the Green to the Gene Revolution: A 21st Century Challenge,' there willalso be special sessions on plant biotechnology, precision agriculture and the impact of climate change.

"The convention will enable us to carve out a new role, particularly in a scenario where the country is no longer food-deficit and farm research has to be re-organised to reflect new priorities. While earlier, we developed varieties with a single point agenda of increasing crop production, today the situation demands breeding for quality traits as well," the IARI Director, Dr S. Nagarajan, said.

For instance, there is a need to examine why millers are able to produce 75-78 kg of atta (flour) from every 100 kg of Australian wheat, whereas the varieties grown in Punjab yield only 68-70 kg. Similarly, while the earlier breeding strategies and selection of parental lines were tailored towards producing a uniform bread-wheat suitable for making rotis, "today we have to evolve specialised varieties for naan, tandoori, rumali roti and pasta."

According to Dr Nagarajan, IARI is looking forward to a generous one-time injection of funds from the Centre, similar to that proposed for the IISc, to facilitate its second-stage transformation. "We now require a booster to convert Indian agriculture into an enterprise, which will eventually place our research on a self-sustaining orbit," he pointed out.

IARI currently has an annual budget of about Rs 120 crore, with another Rs 8-10 crore coming from external sources. Over the last couple of years, the technologies transferred by it to private parties include a process for making azadirachtin (the active ingredient in neem) to Ozone Biotech, Faridabad and the development of a plant-based mosquito larvicide and pyrethrium synergists (natural insecticides with higher potency and bio-efficacy). The last two technologies have been licensed to a UK-based company, Livie Biopesticides.

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