Editorial: Corruption the real problem?

The discovery and disclosure by the Agrochemicals Policy Group (APG) of a parallel, flourishing market for spurious pesticides has come as no surprise. Most people have been made aware of this earlier, by the large number of farmers who committed suicides after they incurred crippling crop losses due to the use of costly but ineffectual pesticides. What is astonishing is that the authorities have not taken due notice of this and have allowed this nefarious business to thrive and even expand. The size of the spurious pesticides market is reckoned to have swelled to around Rs 1,200 crore, which, considering the cost-benefit ratio of pesticide use at 1:5, causes a crop production loss worth Rs 6,000 crore annually. The deprivation suffered by unwary farmers is actually much greater because, in addition to the output loss, their investment (usually with borrowed money) in costly plant protection chemicals is also lost. This is the situation despite having in place an elaborate and well-structured regulatory system for the pesticides sector. The Central Insecticides Board (CIB), created under the Insecticides Act of 1968, and its pesticides registration committee are supposed to lay down and oversee the relevant policies. The state agricultural departments are involved in the enforcement of the law in terms of issuing manufacturing licences, environmental clearances, and monitoring the quality of the products distributed. The circulation of fake and sub-standard plant protection chemicals on such a mammoth scale is, therefore, an unambiguous indictment of this system. The need for urgent corrective action is self-evident.

The strategy to set things right needs necessarily to be multi-pronged. Since the major spurious insecticides manufacturing centres are known — western Uttar Pradesh, coastal Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and western Maharashtra — weeding out unscrupulous manufacturers should not be difficult provided, of course, state administrations and the law enforcement agencies are willing to work in tandem. Besides, since the sales hub for such substandard products is also known (a particular market in Delhi), it should be possible to check the menace from the distribution end as well. Down the line, even the retailers of such spurious pesticides are not difficult to identify, because there is mandatory licensing of all pesticide retailers. At yet another level, the pesticides manufacturers whose brands are being imitated and, hence their business stolen from them, can use the services of private agencies to trace the culprits and report their existence to the relevant authorities. Indeed, the fact that there has been no corrective action despite the evident ease with which any or all of these steps can be taken suggests that there is some other problem that exists, and the finger of suspicion points to widespread corruption.

All this apart, the practice of indiscriminately registering pesticide manufacturing should give way to a more discriminating process. No fewer than 1,200 manufacturing registrations have been issued, though there are only around 250 genuine pesticides formulators. Then, the state-level pesticides quality testing laboratories need the latest equipment so as to enable them to undertake incontrovertible quality analysis. Perhaps the law itself needs to be amended to incorporate provisions for punitive action even against officials found guilty of dereliction of their duties and responsibilities. The country can ill-afford to let farmers be cheated and the farm economy to be shortchanged in this manner.