This year's southwest monsoons had already advanced on the western Indian peninsula and agricultural operations were well underway, when the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), constituted by the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests, began deliberating on the pros and cons of introducing a transgenic variety of cotton seed into India's complex agrarian economy. Barely three months later, in October 2001, a genetically modified variety of cotton crop was found on about 10,000 hectares of land in the western Indian state of Gujarat. While this discovery raises serious doubts about the Indian government's capacity to perform its regulatory functions, subsequent developments also point to the complex web of interest groups and lobbies that the polity has to confront in the immediate future.
The unauthorised use of genetically engineered cotton seeds has sparked off a controversy. While big farmer groups are demanding, even more vociferously, the commercial introduction of transgenic seed varieties, the administration and environmental activists insists that the unauthorised crop must be destroyed. The conflict over cotton in India is not just about the familiar clash between the commercial drive for profit and environmentalist urge to protect biodiversity, it also typifies corporate methods of manufacturing consent in liberalised times.
A cotton controversy
Interestingly, the discovery of illegal Bt cotton plantations was made by the Bombay-based Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco), in which US transgenic crop giant Monsanto holds a 26 per cent equity stake. Mahyco had applied to the GEAC for permission to commercially introduce Bt cotton. Bt is a transgenic variety of cotton that contains the soil bacterium Bacillus thurngiensis (Bt) which encodes an insecticidal protein through a gene called Cryl Ac . Mahyco claims that this. genetic property enables the cotton plant to resist the pest Helicoverpa armigera or bollworm. The company also claimed that it had carried out field trials of Bt cotton, whose "successful" results were apparently submitted to the GEAC. Environmentalists, on the other hand, claimed that the company's field trials would not with stand critical scrutiny and hence could not constitute the basis for official endorsement. The GEAC decided to take a balanced approach and invited the company and its critics for a hearing. Thereafter, on 20 June, GEAC announced its decision to have yet another round of field trials since the available data was grossly inadequate to make any reasonable surmise of yield projections and net agronomic advantage. The GEAC's decision provoked an uproar from the big farm lobby which has repeatedly argued that biotech is the answer to India's agrarian troubles. To compound matters, the GEAC, rather imprudently, found it unnecessary to publicise the available field trial data for independent scrutiny.