Bt-brinjal fiasco

India needs to take a hard look at its GM policy

Illegal cultivation of unapproved genetically modified (GM) Bt-brinjal in a village in the Fatehabad district of Haryana cannot be a one-off incident. The farmer concerned has been growing it since 2017 (by sourcing the saplings from the nearby town), so there is reason to believe that other farmers could also be doing so. There cannot be a supply chain of seeds and seedlings for only one or a handful of farmers. Also, different tests on these brinjals have shown the presence of more than one alien pest-protecting genes and not just the Cry1Ac gene derived from the common soil bacterium,