By Ashok Gulati, Ayushi Gupta & Ritika Juneja, Respectively, Distinguished Professor, Research Associate, and Senior Fellow, ICRIER
In April, the Union Cabinet approved the Mission for Cotton Productivity with an outlay of Rs 5,659 crore, to run from 2026-27 to 2030-31. The intent is to raise lint productivity from 441 kg per hectare (in triennium ending [TE] 2025-26) to 755 kg/ha by 2031. But to understand whether this mission can succeed, it is worth recalling where India once stood and how deep is the crisis in cotton fields.
In 2002, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee approved the commercial cultivation of Bt cotton as cleared by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC). At the time, he said: “The next big revolution that is unfolding in the world is the biotechnology revolution…We must not lag behind others in this revolution.”
India did not lag behind. For a decade, it led. The first Bt hybrids incorporating the cry1Ac gene were approved to resist the bollworm complex. By 2006, GEAC had approved Bollgard II, a second-generation hybrid with two stacked genes. The results were unambiguous. Cotton production rose from 13.6 million bales in 2002-03 to 39.8 million bales in 2013-14, a 193% increase. Annual output grew at 10%, and area expanded by 56%, from 7.6 million hectares (mha) to 11.9 mha. Yields improved by 88%, from 302 kg/ha to 566 kg/ha. India became the largest producer and second largest exporter of cotton. But thereafter, the policies by successive governments, at the state and central levels, undid what science had built.
After Bollgard II, Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech (MMB) India developed the next generation: Bollgard II with Roundup Ready Flex, and Bollgard III incorporating three stacked genes with herbicide-tolerant traits designed to address evolving pest resistance and rising weed-management costs. But they were not released.
What killed them was a sequence of price control decisions that made seed innovation commercially unviable. In 2006, Andhra Pradesh imposed a maximum retail price of Rs 750 per packet, less than half the prevailing price of Rs 1,600, of which Rs 1,250 had been charged by MMB as trait fee. Maharashtra and Gujarat swiftly matched the cap. In 2015, the Centre formalised this through the Cotton Seed Price Control Order, slashing trait fee by 74% from Rs 186.95 to Rs 49 per packet. In 2018, the national retail price was cut further to Rs 740. By 2020, the trait fee had been abolished entirely.
The consequence was direct. Faced with unfriendly regulation, Monsanto withdrew Bollgard II-RRF from GEAC consideration. Meanwhile, advanced agricultural economies routinely plant Bollgard 3 ThryvOn with XtendFlex, a platform combining three-gene caterpillar protection, built-in biological defence against sucking pests, and tolerance to three herbicide groups simultaneously. Today, India is not a leader of the biotechnology revolution in agriculture, nor even a serious participant.
Look at the productivity of cotton — Australia: 2,340 kg/ha; China: 2,311 kg/ha; Brazil: 1,943 kg/ha; and the US: 976 kg/ha. These are lint yields for the TE 2025-26, reported by the International Cotton Advisory Committee. And India, which has the largest cotton-growing area (11 million hectares), has a yield of just 441 kg/ha. The gap between India and its competitors is a precise measure of the gap in technology adoption, research investment, and regulatory ambition.
Since 2014-15, production has declined at an average annual rate of 2%. Had India merely continued on the production trajectory established between 2002 and 2014, cotton output in 2026 would have reached 65.3 million bales. The actual figure in 2025-26 is 29 million bales. The gap is the accumulated cost of a decade of policy failure. India went from a net cotton exporter to importing 4 million bales in 2025-26. It won’t take long for India to become a large importer of cotton if business as usual continues.
It is against this backdrop that one needs to evaluate the Cotton Productivity Mission. The mission’s intent is welcome, but does it have the technology that global giants provide? It does not. Then the trajectory to achieve a productivity target of 755 kg/ha by 2031 remains to be seen. And even if it does, it would still leave India at less than half of what Brazil, China, and Australia achieve today.
Developing new seed varieties requires years of investment in plant breeding, biotechnology, and trait research, followed by a lengthy biosafety regulatory process with no guarantee of commercial approval. Without a policy framework that ensures adequate returns investment, private companies have no rational basis for undertaking it. Price controls that compress trait fees to zero don’t just limit profit, they also eliminate the incentive to innovate.
The government faces a clear choice. Either it restores the intellectual property framework that allows private innovators to recover their costs, which means revisiting the Cotton Seed Price Control Order; or it commits to funding public sector research at a scale sufficient to fill the gap the private sector has left. The current arrangement isn’t sustainable — price controls suppress private innovation, public R&D is chronically underfunded, and farmers are left with dated technology. Can the Cotton Productivity Mission undo this policy damage? Only time will tell.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.
