1. IN INDIA
As India gets ready to unleash a vast number of genetically modified (GM) food crops, politicians have joined
activists in opposing engineered crops. This is snowballing into a volatile political issue with states refusing to
let the Centre have the final say in the matter. A number of chief ministers have objected to field tests of GM
crops being conducted in their backyard, while some have declared that their states will be GM-free, citing
health and environmental concerns. The political standoff comes against the worrying backdrop of slipshod
regulation. Not only is illegal herbicide-tolerant cotton spreading across the country, biosafety regulations are
being openly flouted by private crop developers acting in collusion with public research institutions. At the same
time the industry is demanding a dilution of the rules on field tests and other regulations.Latha
Jishnu and Jyotika Sood uncover the mess in GM crops
Bharatiya Kisan Union workers set fire to fields of transgenic rice in Rampura village of Karnal district in Haryana
AT daybreak on March 11, there was a burst of activity at Litchi Lawn, a corner plot on the sprawling campus of
the Pusa Institute in Bihar‟s Samastipur district. Workers were uprooting the maize growing in a small patch of
land close to the office, intent on finishing their work quickly as they had been instructed. The Pusa Institute is
actually the old home of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) whose headquarters has shifted to
Delhi.
The 540-square-metre maize patch, surrounded by fields of wheat, mustard and cauliflower, and on the north
by the institute‟s famous mango and litchi nursery, looked like any other experimental plot. But something was
clearly not right. After the maize was pulled out, tractors were brought in to level the land and moong, or green
gram, was planted in its place.
Related Articles
What was uprooted so hastily that morning? It was genetically modified
•
Biotech industry has a new patron
(GM) maize, an insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant variety that had
•
Rajasthan opens farm gates
89034 and Event NK603—every cell that successfully incorporates the
been developed by Monsanto. The American biotech giant‟s Event MON
gene of interest represents a unique “event” and the derived transgenic line
•
is identified by such figures—was being tested at several other locations. It
Genetically modified, and spreading
is still a puzzle why the Pusa trial was uprooted in such a rush and the plot
•
Punjab fails to monitor GM trial
•
A treasure too good to lose
replanted so quickly without due regard for contamination of the
subsequent crop.
According to a Monsanto spokesperson, the regulator, the Genetic
Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), had sent them a letter
withdrawing permission for the trial but before the company could respond, the IARI station at Pusa, acting on
orders from its headquarters, had destroyed the trial. A Pusa official told Down To Earth this was done because

2. Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar had told Minister of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh that he did not
want any GM trial in his state and the latter had instructed GEAC to cancel the trial forthwith.
But in its rush to scrap the trial did IARI follow procedures with regard to destruction of GM crops? Interestingly,
it was Nitish Kumar himself who raised the issue. In a letter written to Ramesh three days after the event at
Litchi Lawn, the chief minister pointed out that the maize trial had been “hurriedly uprooted in an unscientific
manner and without the presence of any state agriculture representative”.
He also raised concerns about other possible violations: did IARI Pusa have the required isolation distance in
all directions to ensure that the pollen did not flow to other crops from the GM maize?
In any case the field trials were illegal because Bihar does not have the state biotechnology coordination
committee or the district-level committee, both of which are charged with implementation of the regulations and
overseeing the transgenic field trials in the states (see graphic „How biosafety works in India‟,).
RDAC—Recombinant DNA
Advisory Committee; RCGM—Review Committee on Genetic Manipulation; IBSC—Institutional Biosafety Committee; GEAC—Genetic
Engineering Approval Committee; SBCC—State Biotechnology Coordination Committee; DLC—District Level Committee; ICAR—Indian
Council for Agricultural Research; MEC—Monitoring and Evaluation Committee
If this is the state of play with IARI, which is “the country‟s premier institute for research, education and
extension”, it is not difficult to imagine what is happening elsewhere. As
India becomes a vast testing ground for all kinds of GM crops, which
policymakers believe will usher in the second Green Revolution for the
country (see chart „Welcome to GM country‟, ), there are clear indications
that regulations are being thrown overboard as private crop developers and
the National Agriculture Research System (NARS) join hands on the
testing of GM crops.
The problem with India is that GM crop trials are being approved at
dizzying speed—at one three-hour meeting, GEAC approved 144

3. applications—while little is done to monitor field trials, many of which are illegal because they do not comply
with requirements. Quite often, GEAC has been unaware of where the trials were being held.
The most egregious example of rules being flouted is the case of Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company
(Mahyco), which defied the regulator and used an unapproved cotton hybrid as refugia for its third generation
BG2 RRF cotton that was undergoing the second stage field tests in Maharashtra. Refugia is the prescribed
area where non-GM is grown so that the pests against which the GM trait is being introduced have non-toxic
plants to feed on to delay the build-up of resistance to the GM toxin. GEAC regulations stipulate that 20 per
cent of the area has to be the refuge crop planted all round the field where the GM crop is undergoing tests.