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NEW DELHI: Veterinarian Motilal Madan, 83, who was conferred the fourth-highest civilian award Padma Shri on Monday for his three-decade work in livestock reproduction, has called the conferment an appreciation of the scientific community’s hard work.
“…you do not work for awards. Awards come to you. My team and I worked with dedication to achieve our goals. We kept working and awards kept coming… Which government gave it to me does not matter, because, in the end, it is the appreciation of science.”
Madan carried out the first in vitro fertilization (IVF) of a buffalo calf in the world at Karnal’s National Dairy Institute (NDRI) in 1990. “This award was not conferred to me after 32 years. But instead, I see it as a culmination of all the previous awards I have received,” he said.
Madan was awarded Haryana Vigyan Ratna award in 2020. “I am meant to do my job, and others are meant to do their job in selecting individuals for the Padma awards.”
Madan, who has over 230 publications to his credit in national and international journals, said cows were being produced through IVF at NDRI. “But we wanted to go one step ahead. My team and I attempted IVF on buffalos. They were an unknown animal in the world, but innumerable in India. So, we took the lead in that. In 1990, we were able to produce the first in vitro buffalo calf in the world and named him Pratham… The first cloned buffalo calf in the world was born in 2013 and was named Mahima.”
Madan, who was born in Kashmir, has supervised over 300 calf births at NDRI born through artificial methods. “The most commonly practised at NDRI was through the Embryo Transfer Technique, where one egg donor cow, one surrogate cow, and one bull were involved. The most yielding surrogate cow, through this method, produced 10 calves in a year and over 6,500 litres of milk.”
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