Rao Bahadur Sir Tiruvadi Sambasiva Iyer Venkataraman CIE, FNI, FASc (15 June 1884 – 18 January 1963) was an Indian botanist, agronomist and plant geneticist who specialised in the study and hybridisation of sugarcane. He developed or supervised the development of numerous high-yield sugarcane cultivars, which established India as the world's second largest sugar producer and sustained the sugar industries of numerous other nations, including South Africa, Australia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the United States.
Early life and career Venkataraman was born in Salem, Madras Presidency (now in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu) to an orthodox Tamil Brahmin family; though initially religious, he renounced religion by the age of 16. After graduating from a secondary school in Tiruchirapalli, where he was a brilliant scholar, he enrolled at Presidency College, Madras, where he decided to study botany over zoology, as he strongly disliked dissecting insects and other animals. In 1905, he graduated with a first-class honours B.A. in botany and briefly studied for an M.A. at Madras University before his appointment to the Agricultural College, Saidapet (now a constituent college of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University) as an assistant to Charles Alfred Barber, then a botanist in the Madras Presidency government service. In 1908, the college was moved to Coimbatore, where Venkataraman would spend the rest of his career. He soon demonstrated an aptitude for research, attempting to grow hybridised varieties of eggplant in his spare time.
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