By Ritambhara
Janaki Ammal’s sugarcane hybrids came out of five years at the Sugarcane Breeding Institute in Coimbatore, from 1934 to 1939. She crossed cane with related grasses to help breed sweet varieties suited to Indian fields. Her work rested on one idea, that a crop needs a wide genetic base.
A cytologist from Thalassery
Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal was born in Thalassery, in present-day Kerala, in 1897. She studied botany at Queen Mary’s College in Madras. The University of Michigan awarded her a doctorate in 1931 for chromosome studies of the plant Nicandra. Her method was cytology, the counting and comparison of chromosomes under the microscope. She applied it to cultivated plants for the rest of her working life.
Breeding cane for Indian conditions
In the early twentieth century the sweetest cane, Saccharum officinarum, came to India from Java. The Coimbatore institute wanted home-grown varieties that combined high sugar content with local hardiness. Janaki Ammal worked there as a geneticist. She made intergeneric hybrids of Saccharum with Zea, Erianthus, Imperata and Sorghum. She also studied the chromosomes of cane and its relatives, including bamboo. These crosses helped breeders choose Indian plants to combine with the imported cane. The result was cane better suited to tropical Indian soil and weather.
Counting the chromosomes of crops
She moved to the John Innes Horticultural Institute in London in 1939. There she worked with the geneticist C. D. Darlington. In 1945 the two published the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants. The book gathered chromosome counts for a very large number of crop species. Breeders used it to judge which plants could be crossed. Its premise was simple. A breeder needs a wide stock of related plants, wild and cultivated, to draw on.
From 1946 she worked as a cytologist at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Wisley, in Surrey, where she treated plants with colchicine to produce new forms. After returning to India in 1951, she reorganised the Botanical Survey of India at Jawaharlal Nehru’s invitation. In her final years she backed the campaign to save Kerala’s Silent Valley forest from a hydroelectric dam. The valley became a national park in November 1984. She had died in Madras that February.
One variety across a state
North Indian cane later came to rest on a single variety. Co 0238, released in 2009 by the institute’s Karnal centre, spread rapidly across Uttar Pradesh. It covered about 3 per cent of the state’s cane area in 2013-14 and about 87 per cent by 2020-21, according to the Review of Agrarian Studies (2024) and Down To Earth (2025). Both report that red rot, a fungal disease known in India since 1901, then overcame the variety’s resistance in western Uttar Pradesh. Farmers in Muzaffarnagar, Bijnor and Moradabad lost cane to it. Replacing a dominant variety across a whole state takes several seasons of seed multiplication and replanting.
Janaki Ammal spent her career widening the genetic base of Indian crops. The red rot outbreak shows what follows when that base narrows again. Her work asks breeders, mills and farmers to keep many varieties in the field at once.
