Chapter 12: In Quest of a World Without Hunger

Several biographies of Swaminathan especially those written by Iyer [4] and Dil [1] indicate that Swaminathan’s resolve to eliminate hunger from the face of Earth came to be imprinted on his mind when he was in his late teens coinciding with the Bengal famine of 1943–1944. Basically a Gandhian himself, hunger-related deaths were unbearable to him. Further, that famine-related hunger could strike anywhere in the world was evident from the Irish potato famine of 1845. Food is the most basic among a hierarchy of human needs. His firm resolve to study agriculture and solve the world’s hunger problem even made him overcome his sentiment to study medicine and take over his late father’s hospital in Kumbakonam. Hence, his quest for a hunger-free world started about seven decades ago…