The name of Dr. Radheylal Harelal Richharia, a stalwart defender of India’s seed heritage, is unknown to many institutes and scientists of mainstream agriculture. And yet, he was one of the most eminent agricultural scientists of India. Despite having done path-breaking research on various crops, particularly rice, Richharia is not discussed in the curriculum of the agricultural universities.
Richharia was born in 1909 at the Nandanvara village of the Hoshangabad district in Madhya Pradesh. His father, a headmaster of the local school and a postmaster, was an ardent gardener. From his childhood, young Radheylal used to work closely with his father, experiments with various vegetables in his small plot and discover forest plants in the the neighbouring tribal villages.
Having completed his school education, he went to Balaghat and Varanasi for higher studies. He did his M.Sc. in Botany from Nagpur and wanted to pursue a PhD in England. Primarily to overcome his financial constraints, he took the exam for a scholarship meant to aid students interested in the Indian Civil Services and managed to reach professor P.S. Hudson at Cambridge University. Hudson used to believe that real research work would be successful only if it is useful to farmers.
Returning home in 1931, he was employed as an oilseed expert in Nagpur. In 1942, he started working at Sabour Agricultural College and Research Institute in Bihar. Over 17 years, Richharia perfected extraction of soft linen from flaxseed stalks. At a point, even Mahatma Gandhi expressed his satisfaction with his linen fibre work and asked the Bihar Charka Sangh to continue it. India, meanwhile, continued to import linen fibre from foreign countries.
In 1959, Richharia became the Director of the Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI), Cuttack, and held that position till 1966. He selected some varieties from the Taichung Native One (TN1), a traditional Japonica rice, that were resistant to disease and pest. Along with that, he also started research on traditional rice. From 1971 to 1978, he was the director of the Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute (MPRRI) and the advisor to the Madhya Pradesh government.
In 1942 he started working on the clonal propagation of Rice, meaning, the vegetative propagation of rice. In this process, one needs to transplant seedlings in a phased manner. The third transplanting is the final transplanting. The process saves seeds while increasing yields. Richharia had observed a phenomenal increase in yield – 17% to 61% when compared to normally transplanted seedlings. These seedlings were also more resilient to pests and diseases. This method used fewer seeds and helped in maintaining the purity of the variety. In some cases, the rice matured early.
In 1962, Richharia’s research was published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature (Volume 194, May 12) and was further promoted by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in 1963.
Richharia believed that an indigenous institution such as the CRRI could become the best rice research centre in the world but faced challenges in propagating this idea to the international community. The international community wanted the institute to work only on Japonica crosses. But Richharia found Japonica varieties susceptible to several diseases including Tungro virus, which was not known in India. He warned that if the japonica rice variety entered the country in large quantities without plant quarantine, such diseases would spread to Indica rice varieties. This is indeed what has happened in the decades since.
Richharia was supposed to take over as director-general as per Indian Council of Agricultural Research norms, but that did not come to be. At around the same time, M.S. Swaminathan’s endorsement to the introduction of fertiliser-responsive dwarf varieties of wheat and rice in India, was a dent to his line of thinking.
Richharia filed a case in the Odisha high court against his removal from the CRRI. Water and electricity lines of his official residence were disconnected and he was forced to leave for Bhopal in 1966. After winning the legal case he returned to CRRI, but is said to have found his official chamber locked, and learned that all his research papers had been taken away by the authorities.
In 1971, he joined Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute (MPRRI) in Raipur as director and became the agricultural consultant to the Madhya Pradesh government. In 1976, the World Bank provided Madhya Pradesh a loan of Rs 4 Lakhs and urged the merging of MPRRI with Jawaharlal Krishi Vidyalaya in Jabalpur. This ended Richharia’s attempt to popularise promising and high-yielding indigenous varieties.
Between 1971 and 1976, Richharia collected 17,000 indigenous rice from different parts of what was then undivided Madhya Pradesh. About 967 varieties were sent to 17 districts for trials, with an average yield of 3.98 MT/hectare. The collection also had short duration paddy, 237 varieties of aromatic rice, coarse and fine varieties. Modern dwarf varieties were not suitable in 92% of the rice growing belt of Madhya Pradesh. It is to be noted that average yield of India rice during the last couple of years was not more than 3 ton per hectare (ha).
Under this system, paddy seeds were sown at the onset of rains and the field was ploughed across when the seedlings were five weeks old. Indigenous varieties like Surti Gurmatia and Baikoni outperformed modern varieties like Ratna and Sona under this system. Yield performance of some of the varieties.
Richharia identified several noteworthy paddy varieties which would have a “ratooning” ability while he was at the Bihar Agricultural University at Sabur. Ratooning is an agricultural practice that involves cutting the above-ground parts of a plant after harvest to encourage new growth from the base. He collected 44 cluster rice varieties which could easily be hybridised with other rice. He also identified 22 varieties of purple-leafed rice containing cancer-preventing elements. During his travels in Bastar, he had noticed how Adivasi communities sowed mixed varieties and could identify male sterile lines for facilitating natural hybridisation.
In 1983, the then prime minister Indira Gandhi asked Richharia to develop a plan to increase rice production. Richharia continued his quest and worked at developing a rice encyclopaedia covering 2,000 traditional rice varieties of Madhya Pradesh till he died in 1996.
Science politics affected his career, many believe, yet, Richharia remains alive in the thousands of indigenous rice varieties still grown by the farmers of central India.
At present when farmers are being lured to go for chemical-intensive paddy cultivation with the hope of ever-increasing yields, neglecting not only all other crops like pulses, oilseeds, millets and so on, his work is all the more important.
Anupam Paul is an independent researcher on traditional crops and former additional director of agriculture (P) ,West Bengal. Soumik Banerjee is an independent researcher on traditional foods and crop conservationist.
