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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | IARI soil-testing technology tweaked, private firm has monopoly -Jay Mazoomdaar

IARI soil-testing technology tweaked, private firm has monopoly -Jay Mazoomdaar

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published Published on Aug 22, 2017   modified Modified on Aug 22, 2017
-The Indian Express

As both IARI and IISS continued refining their respective products, procurement under the soil health card scheme gathered steam when the government sanctioned setting up over 6,000 mini labs in 2016-2017.

New Delhi: Despite objections raised by senior officers, a low-cost digital soil-testing technology developed by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), has been tweaked by a sister ICAR institute and the licence for its manufacture and sale given to a sole private company.

Since December last year, the private company, Hyderabad-based Nagarjuna Agro Chemicals Private Limited (NACPL), has sold over 5,000 kits and refills worth Rs 83 crore through NAFED alone, without any tender.

Records accessed by The Indian Express show that in 2009, Delhi-based IARI invented the “Digital Soil Test Fertiliser Recommendation (STFR)” technology — under which a farmer could, using an electronic device, test seven soil parameters and obtain specific fertiliser recommendations. This opened up the possibilities of taking soil-testing facilities, traditionally limited to a handful of institutional laboratories, to the grassroots.

The IARI filed a patent application for STFR in 2011 and started issuing licences for its commercialisation in 2012. In July 2014, NACPL was among several companies that obtained a licence from IARI for commercialising this STFR technology. The next month, the company tied up with another ICAR lab, the Indian Institute of Soil Science (IISS) in Bhopal, to ostensibly improve on the STFR technology.

A day before the Prime Minister launched the nationwide Soil Health Card scheme on February 19, 2015, Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh unveiled Mridaparikshak/mini lab developed by IISS in collaboration with NACPL. Despite IARI’s protestations — “a case of copying of Pusa STFR patented technology with a few more elements and parameters added” — the company secured exclusive rights for commercialising the “proprietary item”.

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The Indian Express, 21 August, 2017, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/iari-soil-testing-tech-tweaked-pvt-firm-has-monopoly-4807690/


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