The barefoot scientist: How a self-taught breeder gave mangoes a winter coat

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Kongara Ramesh is a man of many obsessions. A self taught homeopath, like scores of practitioners in India, he has treated tens of thousands, free of cost. A school dropout, he is also the creator of a handful of unique varieties of mangoes, India’s most beloved fruit.Ramesh is, what you may call, a seasoned plant breeder.

In the early 2000s, he developed a mango that can be frozen skin-on, and stored for months-on-end, peeled like a banana, and savoured like an ice lolly. A terrific feat because mangoes are known to have a short shelf life, usually less than 10 days (only pulp can be frozen and used later). Nearly all known commercial cultivars are susceptible to chill injury, meaning the fruit cannot tolerate sub-zero temperatures.

But the variety Ramesh developed and named Amrutham, which means elixir in Telugu, defies the known boundaries of this tropical fruit.Another early ripening variety he developed is named Swagatham (welcome). This is an intensely aromatic cultivar—one piece is enough to envelop a room with its fragrance. A third, unnamed, yields large intensely sweet fruits, a few notches higher than the sweetest commercial cultivars.Amrutham is a promising and a unique variety of mango because of its ability to resist freezing temperatures, said M.

Sankaran, principal scientist and head of the fruit crops division at the Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Bengaluru. “But one has to consume the fruit in a chilled state (it cannot be thawed and consumed). We have evaluated this variety and submitted the results for registration as a farmer’s variety (under the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act, 2021, a law which recognizes the role farmers play in