... It is indeed a splendid publication

Professor Norman Myers, Fellow at Green College, Oxford University

 Professor Swaminathan has been acclaimed by Time Magazine as one of the most influential Asians of the 20th century. From India, a country with a population of one billion, three names appeared on the list: Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and M. S. Swaminathan.
 This book is about Professor Swaminathan, the only one of the three still alive. This book honours a great man, one of the greatest scientists of our times and the father of the Green Revolution in India.
 On the invitation of Professor Swaminathan, the author, András Erdélyi, spent a month in Madras at the Centre of the Swaminathan Research Foundation. It was in this inspiring environment that he conducted a series of interviews with the professor.
 M. S. Swaminathan established his own research institute in Madras, which soon gained a worldwide reputation thanks to its diverse activities.
 The unique character of the Foundation is the result of its determination to consciously and consistently put the results of scientific research into practice in order to maintain the ecological balance, to establish an environmentalist approach to thinking and production, and primarily, to end poverty and extreme social inequalities.
 The book's description of the scientific programmes of the Centre is complemented by vivid local travelogues. The activities of the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation include the operation of the international programme to save the tropical mangrove forests. The Centre also hosts a gene bank designed to conserve and save traditional, rare, and endangered plants and herbs.
 The author introduces the so-called bio-village programme, and learns about the practical operation of the "Knowledge-system" established in a village south of Madras in 1999. The system uses the achievements of cybernetics in twenty isolated villages in South India. Bruce Alberts, President of The Scientific Academy of the United States of America, while studying the practical operation of the Knowledge-system in the Indian villages, described what he had seen as a virtual academy which should be spread all over the world.
 One of the many fascinating interviews was made in a tribal village in the middle of the mangrove forest. How the Irrular tribe found its place and identity in the social jungle of the twentieth century and the Millennium, and how the ethnographers of the Swaminathan Research Foundation supported this quest are questions the book gives answers to.