Rice did originate in India, not in China

Scientists disprove Asian Big Brother’s claim

New Delhi: One Chinese lie has been finally nailed this time by a team of Indian scientists who provide irrefutable evidence that rice did originate in India, a fact contested by China. There is a deeper scientific conspiracy by the Asian Big Brother to rid India of the tag that our staple food rice actually originated in China and not in Mother India.

Ownership of intellectual property is a hugely emotional issue and can lead to bruising skirmishes. Traditional wisdom has to be guarded at all costs. Lead researcher Nagendra Kumar Singh, a biotechnologist working at National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology, Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, says "Our work proves that rice was indeed domesticated in India."

Rice is native to India is the verdict of a team of scientists at IARI who, while publishing their findings in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, have effectively proved that the rice varieties grown in India have actually originated in India.

This finding which demolishes the Chinese claim is actually a collateral benefit of a neat new development from Singh's laboratory, the development of a new 'DNA chip for rice' a handy tool that will speed up development of new varieties of rice as the world tries to adapt to a changing climate. This chip will also help finger print rice varieties.

Rice is considered to be the 'king of cereals', hence rival claims on its centre of origin cause a lot of heart burn in research community. In the 20th century, it was widely accepted that rice was independently domesticated in both China and India. But, Chinese literature attributed the domestication of rice to legendary Chinese Emperor Shennong.

This legend from Beijing got bold impetus when a landmark 2011 research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences refuted the widely held belief that India was also a centre of origin of rice. It suggested that a single domestication event some 8,200–13,500 years ago, in the Yangtze Valley of China was the source of all rice in the world.

This fact peeved many Indian researchers until this week's new finding which succinctly refutes the Chinese claim. Concurring with the IARI's claim, Gurdev S Khush, Adjunct Professor, University of California, Davis, and former head, Plant Breeding Genetics and Biotechnology, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippines says, "This new paper certainly leads to the conclusion that some of the varieties were domesticated in India."

Therefore, in a way it possibly settles the controversy that China alone should take the credit for giving the world this wonder crop. It seems ancient farmers more than 10,000 years ago independently in both countries figured out that rice was a great plant to cultivate.

The National Gene Bank in India houses about 90,000 different varieties of rice and in parts of Odisha and Chhattisgarh wild relatives of rice can still be found. The IARI Rice Chip accommodates 50,000 combinations of genes on a single plate and is today the best of its kind in the world. Its nearest rival can house only 44,000 variants and was developed by Susan R McCouch at the Cornell University in USA a few years ago.

By Pallava Bagla