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India grows a great deal of sugarcane, but a century ago its canes yielded poorly. A 1930 lecture by Venkataraman, printed in abstract in the Madras Agricultural Journal, noted that India then depended on other countries for more than 85 per cent of its sugar. A plant breeder at Coimbatore, T. S. Venkataraman, spent three decades changing that. His name is also spelt Venkatraman in some sources. This post covers his work, the plant-breeding ideas from your NCERT book that it tests, and a short calculation on backcrossing.
Who was T. S. Venkataraman?
The Indian Academy of Sciences fellow record gives his full name as Tiruvadi Sambasiva Venkataraman, born on 15 June 1884 and died on 18 January 1963. The Indian National Science Academy's biographical memoir, written by J. Thuljaram Rao, says he was born in Salem in the Madras Presidency.
According to the memoir, C. A. Barber was appointed Government Sugarcane Expert at the new Sugarcane Breeding Station, Coimbatore, on 25 October 1912, and took Venkataraman as his assistant. Venkataraman became head of the station in April 1919 and stayed until he retired in 1942.
Why cross cultivated cane with wild cane?
Indian canes had to survive heat, cold, waterlogging and salty soil. Barber and Venkataraman's answer, the memoir says, was to cross the juicy cultivated cane Saccharum officinarum with the hardy wild cane S. spontaneum, which grew beside a channel next to the campus. The memoir calls them the first scientists to use a wild species in a crop-breeding programme.
The first year's hybrid seedlings all died. The next year, while Barber was touring north India, Venkataraman raised seedlings in ordinary field conditions. Barber at first thought they were not sugarcane and ordered them destroyed. Venkataraman kept them on his own time, and within months they formed sugarcane joints.
The ICAR Sugarcane Breeding Institute's landmarks page records that Co 205, the first interspecific commercial sugarcane variety, was released in 1918. The memoir says Co 205 and Co 285 replaced low-yielding local varieties in Punjab, giving 50% more yield and tolerating waterlogging. Venkataraman then brought in a third species, the north Indian S. barberi, to make tri-species hybrids such as Co 244.
Why did NCERT's emasculation method not work for sugarcane?
The current NCERT Class 12 Biology chapter 1 (2026-27 reprint) describes artificial hybridisation. For bisexual flowers, the breeder removes the anthers before they release pollen (emasculation), then covers the flower with a bag (bagging) so only the chosen pollen reaches the stigma.
In a 1930 talk printed in the Madras Agricultural Journal, Venkataraman explained why this was impractical for cane. The flowers are tiny and delicate, and one inflorescence can hold as many as 40,000 flowers. So breeders chose as mothers only varieties with no fertile pollen of their own, then dusted pollen from the chosen father onto their stigmas.
The memoir adds another fix. Because bagging interfered with seed setting, he rooted flowering stalks at their nodes in cheap tile pots and moved them to isolated sheds, away from stray pollen. He jokingly called these sheds "nuptial chambers".
Worked example: what does backcrossing do?
A 2014 Current Science article by Ramesh Maheshwari and Anantanarayanan Raman explains nobilisation: repeatedly backcrossing a hybrid to a noble cane, S. officinarum. The F1 of officinarum and spontaneum is the first nobilisation; each backcross to officinarum is the next.
Here is the idea in a simple model, treating the crop like a diploid where each parent gives half its genes.
F1 (officinarum x spontaneum): 1/2 = 50% spontaneum.
First backcross to officinarum: half of 50% = 25% spontaneum.
Second backcross: half of 25% = 12.5% spontaneum.
Each backcross halves the wild share, keeping some hardiness while restoring sugar content. Real sugarcane is polyploid and, as the INSA memoir notes, its inheritance is complicated, so it does not follow these neat fractions exactly.
Venkataraman's 1930 talk also gives a sense of scale. Over 200,000 hybrid seedlings were raised each year at Coimbatore, and about 40,000 were grown to maturity. That is 40,000 / 200,000 = 0.2, or 1 in 5.
Common mistakes to avoid:
Saying emasculation is always needed. NCERT says it is not needed for unisexual flowers; only bagging is.
Confusing interspecific and intergeneric. Officinarum x spontaneum is interspecific (same genus). His 1930 sugarcane x sorghum cross was intergeneric.
Thinking cuttings create variation. Vegetative propagation copies a plant; variation comes from the seedlings.
What else did he try?
The 1930 talk reports a cross between sugarcane and a Coimbatore sorghum, which he described as apparently the first recorded intergeneric hybrid with sugarcane, aiming at a shorter-duration crop. The memoir describes a 1936 sugarcane x bamboo cross; later studies suggested the seedlings may have formed without true fertilisation. E. K. Janaki Ammal studied the chromosomes of these crosses; read our post on her work at Coimbatore. The memoir also credits him with pioneering studies of sugarcane roots, and says his station was the first to induce flowering in non-flowering varieties by photoperiodic treatment.
He was made Rao Bahadur in 1928 and knighted in 1942, which the memoir describes as a first for an agricultural scientist in India, and received the Padma Bhushan in 1956.
What can a student learn from how Venkataraman worked?
Look around you. The wild cane by a channel, and later a bamboo hedge, gave him ideas.
Adapt the textbook method. When emasculation failed, he chose male-sterile mothers and built isolation sheds.
Trust careful observation. He kept seedlings his boss wanted destroyed, and they proved him right.
For the full chapter on pollination and hybridisation, see our guide to sexual reproduction in flowering plants. When a plant-breeding term will not stick, the Fermi Concept Library covers every concept in biology with its own lesson.
Write the emasculation and bagging steps from NCERT in order, then note which step Venkataraman had to replace for sugarcane, and why.
