Slowly but surely, the elephant is catching on. We have to do this right for land is being gobbled up by the sharks. Somebody well-informed told me only a quarter of land price was declared for tax purposes; and so cropped area is falling. This makes seeds terribly important.
We did not exactly cover ourselves with glory in the initial thrust on cotton Bts, but brinjal has all the possibilities. We are not as gung ho as the Americans and Chinese who do it anyway. Europeans don?t do it at all although in the Lisbon Protocol there was rethinking. We introduce a seed after checking it out. The strategy comes from a Swaminathan Committee which was set up by the agriculture ministry, and pushed by me as science and technology minister; since in my day biotechnology was also a part of my work. Swaminathan said we won?t just do GM or say no to GM.
The advantages are too great and if you goof up, so are the costs. So we do it case by case, experimentally grow GM crops under protected conditions and only when the science boys say yes, we go ahead. MNCs will crib, but tough luck. So Bt brinjal made the grade after a couple of years of checking it out. It will spread fast for the gains are high. Others will follow.
GM cotton was not a good story initially. Mind you, one of India?s finest cotton breeders swears it was not genetically engineered perhaps only accidentally modified and any way was sponsored initially by the State. When the ruckus started it had been around for a few years and no damage had been seen.
In any successful system, Nav Bharat Agro, the highly successful cotton Bt enterprise, would have built strategic alliances. But our regulators called him a criminal and threatened to burn the fields of half a million farmers who bought his seeds. Now it?s all memory, but even today a lot of the Bt seed is not hundred percent pucca in terms of approvals and now you have it in paddy and other crops also.
We need a high level review. My favorite model is the pharma model. When I was science and technology minister, we set up the Technology Development Board to help Indian firms to cover the last mile with Indian technology. We got CII to champion the cause. A struggling company helped was Shantha Biotech?to productionise the Hepatitis Vaccine with an Indian technology. Shantha was heavily critiqued by the French MNC leading the pack for the product. But later, another French company wanted to merge with Shantha.
Strategic alliances are the name of the game. There probably are not more than 20 MNCs in a field, but more than a thousand smaller fellows can really spread the technology. We need a new regulating regime. Uncontrolled, even if benignly illegal, Bt can be a potential disaster. Yet the advantages of descaling must be garnered.
The legal regime also needs a look at. These seeds are expensive. The farmer buys them for his unit costs go down as yield expands and other expensive inputs like pesticides are needed less. But in the one in a thousand failure he is doomed to, a large unpaid loan will drive him to the wall.
In the old days the seeds corporation or the agricultural university could be held responsible and the State would step in. Now there is a grey area. One collector can be gung ho and take ?action? on the company, another one may not, for the law is hazy. We need clear laws and regulatory drills. But all these are solvable problems.
The ICAR should now build a research plan as a private public partnership using a long term genetic mapping structure for the different agro climatic regimes of India. The Pusa gene bank should be the base. Bt brinjal is good. The prospect of more GM seeds is even better.
The author is a former Union minister