Critics
Despite these awards and honors, the credibility of Swaminathan and his promotion of biotechnology remains open to question by some. His record retains some controversy. There are cases of scientific fraud and scandals involving the suicide of a fellow scientist at the ICAR. The first among those who came to expose many of the claims made by MS Swaminathan was Claude Alvares. In his article The Great Gene Robbery 23 March 1986 The Illustrated Weekly. Alvares provided enough evidence to show that most of the research that was initiated by him and the International Rice Research Institute was not original. Shiv Vishwanathan in an EPW article wrote he is a sociological phenomenon. He is paradigm, exemplar, dissenter, critic and alternative. .....Swaminathan always assimilates the new. Claude Alvares gives a better picture:
Strangely, he has become more and more akin to HYV of the seeds he sells. Like them, he is capable of high-yielding varieties of phrase and word. At a Gandhi seminar, he will speak of the relevance of Gandhi. At a meeting in Madras on the necessity of combine harvesters. At another meeting on appropriate technology, he will plump for organic manures. At a talk in London, he will speak on the necessity of chemical fertilizers. He will label slum dwellers ‘ecological refugees’, and advertise his career as a quest for ‘imparting an ecological basis to productivity improvement.’ This, after presiding over, and indiscriminately furthering, one of the ecologically most devastating technologies of modern times – the HYV package of the Green revolution.
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