MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 99 of 100

Correct — option (2), '(a), (c), (d), (e)'. Five statements are printed here, (a) to (e), and four of them hold. Statement (a) is correct: M. S. Swaminathan was born at Kumbakonam in what is now Tamil Nadu in 1925 and lived in Chennai, where he died on 28 September 2023 — his death is the reason he was in the news in the year before this paper was set. Statement (c) is correct in substance: he was an agricultural scientist in government service, serving as Director-General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and as Secretary to the Government of India in the Department of Agricultural Research and Education. Statement (d) is correct: he was a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha from 2007 to 2013. Statement (e) is correct: he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award — the paper prints it as 'Raman Magsaysay' — in 1971. Statement (b) is the one that fails, and it fails on the university. His doctorate was from CAMBRIDGE, taken in 1952 at the School of Agriculture there for work on polyploidy in the genus Solanum, after a first degree in agricultural science from Madras and postgraduate work at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute; he did not study at Oxford. Look at how the options are built: statement (b) appears in every one of the three wrong options and in none of the answer, so the entire question comes down to knowing which of the two English universities he attended.

• (1)(a), (b), (c), (e) — Three of the four statements this option names are correct, but it admits statement (b), which sends him to Oxford instead of Cambridge, and it drops statement (d), his membership of the Rajya Sabha from 2007 to 2013. The Oxford-for-Cambridge substitution is the standard falsification for an Indian scientist educated in Britain, because candidates remember 'a doctorate in England' and not which university granted it. Swaminathan's was Cambridge, in 1952.
• (3)(b), (c), (d), (e) — This option keeps the false statement about Oxford and discards statement (a), that he belonged to Tamil Nadu — which is not only true but is among the best-known facts about him, since he was born at Kumbakonam and spent his working life largely in Chennai, where he founded his research foundation. A candidate reaches this combination by treating the state of origin as the doubtful item and the foreign university as the safe one, which is precisely the wrong way round.
• (4)(a), (b), (c), (d) — This option again carries the Oxford error and additionally omits statement (e), the Ramon Magsaysay Award, which he received in 1971. It is worth learning his honours as a sequence, because they are asked directly: Padma Shri in 1967, the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1971, Padma Bhushan in 1972, the World Food Prize as its first laureate in 1987, Padma Vibhushan in 1989, and the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 2024. Any option that excludes the Magsaysay Award from a list of his distinctions can be rejected on that ground alone.

Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan (7 August 1925 - 28 September 2023) is called the father of the Green Revolution in India. Trained in agricultural science at Madras and in cytogenetics at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, he took his doctorate at Cambridge in 1952 and returned to a career in Indian public science. Working with Norman Borlaug's semi-dwarf Mexican wheat varieties, he led the programme that adapted them to Indian conditions in the mid-1960s and, together with the agriculture minister C. Subramaniam and a policy package of assured procurement, minimum support prices, fertiliser and irrigation, converted a country importing wheat under emergency arrangements into one that was self-sufficient in cereals within a decade. He was Director-General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and Secretary of the Department of Agricultural Research and Education, then Director-General of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines from 1982 to 1988, and in 1988 founded the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation at Chennai, which took his later work towards biodiversity, coastal ecology and what he called an evergreen revolution — productivity increases without ecological harm. He chaired the National Commission on Farmers, which reported between 2004 and 2006 and whose recommendation that the minimum support price be fixed at fifty per cent above the weighted average cost of production has remained a live political demand ever since. He was a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha from 2007 to 2013, and the Bharat Ratna was announced for him posthumously in 2024.

MPSC sets a question of this kind after a major national figure dies, and it does so as a biographical checklist: state, education, professional position, public office, honour. The falsified item is usually the one a newspaper obituary treats as background rather than as headline — here the university. That has a general lesson: when a figure is in the news, the examinable detail is often not the achievement everyone repeats but the one line of the biography that a reader skims. Notice too the shape of the option grid. All three wrong options contain statement (b) and the answer does not, so a candidate certain about Cambridge can answer without adjudicating the other four statements at all. Scanning for a statement that appears in every wrong option, or in every option, is worth doing before any detailed reasoning on a five-statement list; in this paper Q99 has five statements and Q100 has six, and the technique saves more time as the list grows. Note finally the paper's printing: the award is set as 'Raman Magsaysay', and the statements carry the grammar the commission used.

• M. S. Swaminathan was born at Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu on 7 August 1925 and died at Chennai on 28 September 2023.
• He took his doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 1952, after a degree in agricultural science from Madras and postgraduate work at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute.
• He served as Director-General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and as Secretary in the Department of Agricultural Research and Education, and as Director-General of the International Rice Research Institute from 1982 to 1988.
• He received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1971 and was the first laureate of the World Food Prize in 1987.
• He was a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha from 2007 to 2013.
• He chaired the National Commission on Farmers, which reported between 2004 and 2006 and recommended a minimum support price fifty per cent above the weighted average cost of production.
• He founded the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation at Chennai in 1988, and the Bharat Ratna was announced for him posthumously in 2024.

• Substituting Oxford for Cambridge — the single error on which this question turns
• Overlooking the Ramon Magsaysay Award among his honours, which the paper spells 'Raman Magsaysay'
• Doubting the plainest biographical statement, his Tamil Nadu origin, while accepting a detail about a foreign university
• Failing to notice that one statement appears in every wrong option, which is the fastest route through a five-statement list

When a nationally significant figure dies, MPSC asks about them in the next cycle through a biographical statement list, and occasionally through a single-line item on the honour or the commission most associated with them. For Swaminathan the recurring hooks are the Green Revolution, the National Commission on Farmers and the minimum support price formula, and the honours sequence. Prepare such figures as a compact record — birth state, education, principal office, one committee or commission chaired, and the honours with their years.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The National Commission on Farmers, which recommended that the minimum support price be fixed at fifty per cent above the weighted average cost of production, was chaired by :

  • (a)M. S. Swaminathan
  • (b)Norman Borlaug
  • (c)Verghese Kurien
  • (d)C. Subramaniam

  Answer(a) M. S. Swaminathan — the commission was constituted in 2004 and submitted its reports up to 2006; its recommendation on the minimum support price has remained a standing demand in Indian farm politics. Norman Borlaug was the American plant scientist whose wheat varieties underpinned the Green Revolution, Verghese Kurien led the dairy cooperative movement, and C. Subramaniam was the agriculture minister of the Green Revolution years.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  M. S. Swaminathan was the first recipient of which international award, instituted in 1986 ?

  • (a)The Ramon Magsaysay Award
  • (b)The World Food Prize
  • (c)The Borlaug Award
  • (d)The UNESCO Science Prize

  Answer(b) The World Food Prize — he was its first laureate, in 1987. He had earlier received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1971, which is a separate and older honour.