A Review of Code Paroda: A Life in Service of Agricultural Science

Abstract

Code Paroda, narrated by Dr Rajendra Singh Paroda to authors Sanjay Kumar and Arun Tiwari, is at once a personal memoir, an institutional history, and a sustained meditation on the purpose and practice of public agricultural science in India. Organised in four parts — “Making of the Man,” “At the Helm,” “Ascend,” and “Legacy” — the book covers, across 422 pages, a professional life that began in the agrarian landscape of Rajasthan in 1942 and has engaged with nearly every significant institution and policy development in Indian agricultural research across seven decades. It is a book that will reward readers at multiple levels: agricultural scientists and students will find in it both a career model and a map of the research ecosystem; historians of science and policy scholars will find rich primary material on institutional decision-making across a formative period; and general readers with an interest in India’s development trajectory will find it an illuminating account of how a postcolonial nation built, tested, and gradually transformed its scientific infrastructure for food and agriculture.