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Desi GM seed buried after season of scandal by Jaideep Hardikar

In the summer of 2009, farmer Ramesh Dhumale was excited when he got to plant about a kilo of seeds of what was pitched as the country’s first indigenously developed genetically modified (GM) cotton.

At Rs 200 a kg, the seeds were far cheaper than the Rs 1,500-2,000 that the other GM cotton seeds cost. But the biggest plus was that the farmers could use and reuse the seeds from successive crops.

The expensive GM cotton hybrids, based on foreign technology, required the farmers to buy the seeds every year.

“We wanted our seed sovereignty back,” said Dhumale, 58, a resident of Wardha district in Maharashtra. “The Bikaneri Narma-Bt (BN-Bt) promised us that.”

So, some 10,000 cotton farmers in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka celebrated the BN-Bt’s arrival by planting the seeds on at least half an acre on their farms.

In a crowded GM cotton-seed market dominated largely by private companies, here was the first desi variety from the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) stable.

A searing drought in 2009 caused the crop to fail, denying the farmers enough yield from which they could extract seeds for planting the following year. So, Dhumale thought he would buy the seeds again.

What he had not expected was that within six months of releasing the seeds, the ICAR would withdraw them and later discontinue their production without spelling out the reason.

“I wondered what the reason was,” Dhumale said. “We needed that seed.”

The genie was out two years later, on December 27 last year, when the ICAR, which oversees public-sector farm research, stopped its GM cotton research.

There was nothing indigenous about its GM cotton, the ICAR admitted, confirming a lingering doubt that had first prompted it in December 2009 “to suspend seed production and commercial sale”. (See chart)

It acknowledged that the gene sequence in the BN-Bt, which Indian public-sector scientists had claimed to have developed in-house, was actually the same as the one patented in 1985 by US giant Monsanto and which is already out in 2,000-odd cotton seed varieties sold in the Indian market.

Fraud or goof?

The ICAR wouldn’t say whether this was an instance of “scientific fraud”. In an emailed reply to The Telegraph’s queries, the council’s chief of public relations, Anil Sharma, said the ICAR was “instituting an experts committee to look into the entire issue”.

Sources said the committee would look to answer several questions while fixing accountability. The Karnataka government has launched its own inquiry since it administers one of the key institutes involved, the University of Agriculture Sciences in Dharwad.

The questions to be answered include:

Did Indian scientists indeed develop a gene sequence distinct from Mon-531?

Was this a case of contamination by Mon-531, as some of the scientists involved have argued? If so, how and where did that happen, and why was no trace of the “indigenous” gene sequence found in BN-Bt samples?

The fiasco did not cause any huge financial loss to the farmers apart from dashing their hopes for cheaper and renewable seeds, but it’s a huge embarrassment for the ICAR and a blow to the credibility of India’s public-sector cotton research.

Besides, the BN-Bt project, on which the ICAR had spent Rs 2 crore, had pushed all other public-sector research on cotton to the backburner.

Some farmers in Wardha are asking why the ICAR needed to withdraw the seed, since Monsanto’s intellectual property right over Mon-531 had expired in 2005, which means the company could not have dragged the ICAR to court.

The ICAR, in its reply to this newspaper’s questions, said it would have been improper to continue production till the matter had been fully probed, but a highly placed source in the council cited what appeared to be a more serious concern.

“We got the approval (for commercial cultivation of BN-Bt) of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (an environment ministry arm) based on the claim that BN-Bt contained BNLA106. But it is actually Mon-531 — it’s like fudging the data,” said the source who didn’t want to be named.

If the council wants to reintroduce BN-Bt commercially, it will have to seek a fresh approval after rectifying the error in the original data it had forwarded.

“That would be like telling the approval committee, ‘We had cheated you the last time’,” the source said.

Good intentions

Yet, the intentions with which India’s public-sector scientists had begun the project to develop an indigenous GM cotton — as part of the World Bank-aided National Agriculture Technology Project — were sound.

India is among the largest producers and consumers of cotton with a seed market worth $300 million, and has 121 million hectares growing the natural fibre this year. Some 95 per cent of it is GM cotton, whose Bt gene sequence is sourced from Monsanto.

Monsanto had in the year 2000 begun field trials of its Bt cotton in India and looked set to monopolise the local markets.

What the public sector wanted to give the farmers was a cheaper GM cotton seed that they could re-plant again and again by preserving it from the new crop — a traditional practice that died with the emergence in the 1990s of hybrid varieties that can’t be re-planted.

Molecular scientist P. Ananda Kumar, head of the institute that claimed to have developed the “indigenous” Bt gene sequence, was principal investigator of the project to develop GM cotton between 1998 and 2004.