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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Panel finds lapses in development of ‘first indigenous Bt cotton’ -K Venkateshwarlu

Panel finds lapses in development of ‘first indigenous Bt cotton’ -K Venkateshwarlu

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published Published on Dec 19, 2012   modified Modified on Dec 19, 2012
-The Hindu

ICAR “shielding errant officials” by delaying the report

In a damning indictment of the way some Bt cotton varieties were developed and commercialised in the country, a committee headed by Prof. S.K. Sopory, Vice-Chancellor of JNU, found that indigenous Bikaneri Nerma (BN) Bt cotton variety was contaminated by a gene patented by Monsanto.

Having found lapses in the “BNLA106 event”, the committee has held as “invalid” the data obtained from bio-safety studies and field trials with BNBt as these were conducted with material that contained Monsanto’s “MON531 event”. The committee’s finding raises disconcerting questions over the claims made by developers, the role of regulatory body, the public sector research institutions and their ethical standards.

“The purified BNBt, as far as its bio-safety and evaluation studies are concerned, is a new event that must now go through the regulatory process as a fresh application, if ICAR intends to commercialise it,” the committee observed.

Touted as the “first indigenous public sector-bred Genetically Modified crop in India”, the BNBt cotton variety and Bt NHH hybrid were developed in a collaborative effort of the National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology, New Delhi, the Central Institute for Cotton Research (CICR), Nagpur, and University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Dharwad.

The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), the apex regulator, approved it for commercial release in 2008 and it was cultivated in about 8,400 hectares in Kharif of 2009.

But a few months later, cotton growers and State seed agencies complained that performance and yields did not match their expectations and that the BNBt seed samples contained Monsanto’s gene/ event. Consequently, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) ordered suspension of seed multiplication and commercialisation and instituted this enquiry with senior scientists.

The committee had other startling findings. The fundamental flaw found was that the whole BNBt project rested on a single event and there were no other events to carry out an event selection process. “Event specific primers were not developed for BNBt,” it observed.

The panel felt the project was “poorly planned” and implemented with inappropriate distribution of work elements. It listed several institutional and ethical failings, lapses on regulatory front and found conflict of interest with developers sitting in the GEAC meeting as regulators and approving their own product.

Reacting to the report, the Coalition for a GM-Free India, congratulated the Committee for its thorough investigation and exposing “one of the worst cases of scientific fraud within the ICAR institutions”.

The Coalition expressed dismay at the way the ICAR was “shielding the errant officials” by delaying the report. The report was submitted to the Union Ministry of Agriculture in August but has been made public now. “Apparently the establishment waited for the retirement of a senior official while another senior technocrat was protected as he does not figure in the enquiry or the report, though he was the coordinator of this project.”

The Hindu, 19 December, 2012, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/panel-finds-lapses-in-development-of-first-indigenous-bt-cotton/article4215389.ece


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