📰 Centre rejects State’s request to grant religious minority tag to Lingayat/Veerashaiva community
•The Union government on Monday told the Karnataka High Court that it has rejected the recommendation of the State government to grant religious minority status to Lingayat and Veerashaiva community.
•The Union government, in its November 23, 2018 letter written to the State government, has reiterated the earlier stand of the Centre that Lingayat/Veerashaiva community is part of Hindu religion.
•A memo in this regard has been filed before a Division Bench comprising Chief Justice Dinesh Maheshwari and S. Sujatha during the hearing on the petitions, which had questioned the process initiated by the State to grant religious minority status to the community during December 2017.
•Subsequently the High Court had put a rider stating that the process initiated by the State would be subject to the outcome of the petitions. Later the Karnataka State Minorities Commission constitutes a seven-member panel to look into the demand for minority status and the committee recommended in favour of the demand.
•Following this, the State government in March this year wrote to the Union government recommending the grant of minority status.
📰 U.S. and India call for more joint air exercises
Cope India 2018 under way at Kalaikunda base in Bengal
•As Cope India 2018 — the 12-day joint exercise between the U.S. and Indian Air Force being held at the Kalaikunda air station in West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur district — draws to a close, officials of both countries called for such joint exercises to be held more frequently.
•More than 100 personnel of the U.S. Air Force, along with 400 personnel of the Indian Air Force, are participating in the exercise that will conclude on December 14.
•The exercise follows the Joint International Air Drill of Pakistan and China, which began at the Shaheen VII airbase in Pakistan earlier this month.
Huge Indian fleet
•The U.S. Air Force has sent a dozen F-15 whereas the IAF is participating with a fleet of 10 Sukhoi 30, six Jaguars and four Mirage 2000. Along with the Kalaikunda Air Station, the exercise is being conducted from the adjoining Air Station Arjan Singh (located at Panagarh).
•Speaking to journalists on Monday, Cope India 2018 director, Air Commodore J.S. Mann, said that mutual understanding of operational air power and the best practices learnt from each other during the joint exercise would help the countries “operate together in the times to come”.
•Lt. Col. Daryl Insley, who is heading the U.S. forces, said that his only regret was that the forces could train only for two weeks. “We need to train on a regular basis more often, and not after five to 10 years,” he said during an interaction.
•The joint air exercise between the two air forces is being held after 13 years. The last time too it was held at the Kalaikunda Air Station in 2005. Commanding officer of the Kalaikunda Air Station, Air Commodore Shaji Antony, also emphasised on the need of more such exercises and said, “We learn from each other during such exercises.”
War games conducted
•The collaborative and cooperative exercise over the past eight days involved formation of teams, comprising pilots and aircraft of both the air forces, participating in war games over the air space of Kalaikunda.
•Officials of the IAF said that the air station was ideal for holding such exercises not only because it is one of the largest air stations in the region but also because as it has a large reserve air space of hundreds of square kilometres.
📰 Ascent to the temple of democracy
The opposition to the Sabarimala order is reflective of a wider gender inequality in Malayali society
•Kerala’s reputation as a society that has evolved to an exceptional degree may have taken a bit of a beating. The reputation itself has been built on the strides made in the sphere of development, by now internationally recognised to be human development as reflected in the health and education status of a people.
The Kerala paradox
•When it was first noticed over four decades ago, Kerala’s perceived uniqueness had stemmed from the realisation that it was among India’s poorest States. To have achieved fairly high human development despite relative poverty was considered noteworthy. What was not apparent in the usual indicators, however, was something even more unique, the ending of social hierarchy. The caste system, which was at the centre of Kerala’s social arrangements, disintegrated virtually overnight. This was fuelled by the enactment of a land reform programme that ended feudalism. With feudalism went the equivalence between caste dominance and economic power. If evidence ever was needed for the Marxian view that it was the economic base of a society that undergirded its ‘superstructure’ this was it. What is significant is that the transition had been smooth, without recrimination for loss or retribution for injustice. Social distance in terms of caste distinctions just died.
•Given the experience of the ending of a feudalism that had persisted for centuries in Kerala, the reception to the Supreme Court’s verdict on the practice of excluding women of menstruating age from the shrine at Sabarimala is disappointing. It is not as if the ruling has been received with sullen acceptance alone. It has been followed by vigilantes actually preventing the very few women who have attempted to enter the shrine since from doing so. Reports of heckling and intimidation that have led to disheartened women returning without darshan is likely to have left many a Malayali patriot ashamed.
•To understand the reaction to one of the last bastions of male privilege being thrown open to women, we may turn to the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault had observed that while Marxism, a powerful tool for social analysis, emphasises the relations of production, it ignores the relations of power. Power for Foucault is ubiquitous and ramifies into every dimension of human association. Patriarchy or the idea of rule by men would be one of the sources of power. Heteronormativity and the claim of the racial superiority of certain ethnic groups have also served as sources of power. Power for Foucault can draw its force from sources that are entirely unrelated to economic class. Thus in Kerala, for instance, patriarchy is entrenched across all classes and social groups. It did not vanish with the land reforms, even if its architects had wanted it to happen. From the recent events at Sabarimala we can see that some sections do not want it to lose its stranglehold even today.
•The opposition to women’s entry at Sabarimala is at times met with an appeal to history, that the temples of Kerala have witnessed far greater transformation in the past, having been thrown open to all sections of Hindus over 75 years ago. While this history is correctly recounted, the issue of women’s entry into temples is not a matter of accepting the inevitability of change, it is a matter of recognising what living in a democracy implies for its members. Even as democracy guarantees rights to the individual, it requires him to acknowledge the rights of others. It is easily overlooked that it is democracy that grants the freedom to practise a religion. The Church was discouraged in the former Soviet Union, China frowns upon the faith of the Uighurs, and the Saudi Arabian state is not exactly tolerant of religious plurality.
Linked to representation
•However, while democracy assures freedom to practise religion, citizens are expected to practise it in a way that is consistent with democracy. So the traditionalists on the Sabarimala issue must recognise that by excluding women, they are not keeping their side of the social contract as it were. In a democracy, the social contract is not between the state and the people, it is one entered into by citizens among themselves. As B.R. Ambedkar is believed to have advised Jawaharlal Nehru, you cannot have a republic within a republic. In the Indian context, the implication of this principle is that religion must be practised in a way consistent with constitutional values; at a minimum the practices cannot be discriminatory. Legal provisions against domestic violence and the ill-treatment of children point to the reach of democracy even into our homes. Religion cannot claim special dispensation. It need hardly be emphasised that the principle that religion be practised in accordance with the norms of democracy extends to all religions. Indian secularism would be tested on this idea.
•In a way, the opposition to the entry of women to Sabarimala is reflective of a wider inequality between men and women that may be observed in Malayali society. Two indicators point to this, despite the very high literacy levels registered by women and a significant presence of women with higher education. First, female labour force participation is low in Kerala in comparison with other States. Surely the equality of women must be visible in their participation in the workforce. In Kerala, women were once a major presence in agriculture but this declined when paddy cultivation atrophied. The low female labour force participation in Kerala affects their ability to influence social norms, especially social attitudes towards female agency.
•Second, the presence of women in governance roles is very low in Kerala. Three indicators may be noted, namely, the percentage of women legislators, judges in the High Court and leaders of political parties. It may come as a surprise to note that for the former two indicators the number is lower for the State than it is for Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. This despite the fact that Malayali women participate in elections at least to the same extent as men. Political parties of Kerala have made little effort to induct women into leadership positions. How much of this is due to male chauvinism and how much to inadequate women’s agency is a question to be debated. However, a recent incident does help us see through the thicket. The union of Malayalam film actors, a highly feted body, was in the news for trying to protect an actor accused of abetting assault against a co-star despite the fact that he had been jailed. They held out till its leadership was publicly dragged over the coals by four determined women, some of them quite young. Such endings are few and far between but give rise to hope that women will eventually receive their due in Kerala.
A longer journey
•It is hoped that the Sabarimala shrine, a site of popular worship with a long history and of great beauty, will henceforth be open to women of all ages. But for Kerala ending exclusion at this one site can only be the beginning of the much longer journey to gender equality in its society. The present situation bears comparison with what Nirad Chaudhuri had said of the British Empire, that it “extended subjecthood but denied citizenship”. In the case of Kerala’s women, its society may have extended education but withheld empowerment. So long as women are not represented in the upper echelons of decision-making it will be difficult to break this mould.
📰 Anchored in human rights
Instead of surveillance technologies, help TB patients by providing rights-based interventions
•Decades of global neglect have resulted in tuberculosis (TB) becoming the leading cause of adult deaths in most of the global south — it kills nearly two million people a year. This is shocking given that TB is curable and preventable. But there are signs of change as the spotlight shines on TB; including the United Nations Declaration of September 2018 titled “United to End Tuberculosis: An Urgent Global Response to a Global Epidemic”, where heads of state and government have “reaffirmed their commitment to end the global TB epidemic by 2030”.
Intrusive technologies
•But not all attention is good. An emergent and disturbing arsenal of surveillance technologies has caught the attention of international and domestic policy makers and threatens to detract from an effective response to TB that is anchored in human rights and has a human touch. For example, a plan in India is to implant microchips in people in order to track them and ensure they complete TB treatment. There are also seemingly endless technological tweaks to the Directly Observed Treatment, short course (DOTS) strategy, which requires patients to report every day to a health authority, who watches them swallow their tablets. Now, governments use, or plan to soon use, a strategy of video, tablets, phones and drones to carry the old DOTS strategy into the technology era.
•An obsession with new gadgets in disease management — in the context of a disease that could be eliminated in a relatively inexpensive way through human-rights based interventions — is strange. This thinking envisions a TB response that is not with and for people who have TB but rather against suspects who must be targeted, tracked, traced and, above all, never trusted.
Some interventions
•December 10 was World Human Rights Day, which is a reminder also that we can only beat TB using an approach anchored in human rights. Such an approach focusses on creating health systems that foster trust, partnership and dignity. This approach regards people with TB not as subjects to be controlled but as people to be partnered with. It assumes that people with TB have dignity, intelligence and empathy that motivate them to act in the best interests of themselves and their communities when empowered to do so. We cannot beat TB through a response rooted in control and coercion. Therefore, we suggest three interventions to which the funding for surveillance technology should be redirected.
•The first is new treatment. In contrast to the dozens of whirring and chirping surveillance gizmos are bedaquiline and delamanid, the only new TB drugs to have come to the market in 50 years. These drugs are far more effective against drug-resistant TB than prevailing treatments made up of toxic drugs and painful injections that only work about half the time and often cause disability and psychosis.
•New guidelines by the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend the use of bedaquiline and delamanid against drug-resistant TB. But to date, only about 30,000 people have received the new drugs; compare this to the over 500,000 people who get sick with drug-resistant TB every year.
•In other words, we mount an arsenal of cutting-edge technology to corral people into taking torturous, ineffective drugs even while we fail to use available drugs that work far better. If adherence is the goal, providing drugs that work would be a good place to start.
•International institutions, donors and countries need to focus and collaborate on the urgent production and distribution of affordable generics of bedaquiline and delamanid. Meanwhile, we must escalate from all levels pressure on companies such as Johnson and Johnson and Otsuka to drop their prices to a dollar a day for each medication so that their exorbitant prices no longer exclude the vast majority of people from accessing the drugs.
•The second is the human touch. Employ and deploy community health-care workers. Many domestic TB policies envision community health-care workers as the backbone of the response, yet, in practice, these front-line workers remain shockingly underused. In sufficient numbers equipped with proper training and dignified conditions of employment they would lead the response by bringing care to those furthest from the reach of traditional health-care systems. Such programmes would also have the incidental, yet hugely significant, benefit of employing millions of people. WHO should focus on recommendations around this cadre of workers and donors should focus funding to programmes that make the most of them.
•The last is accountability. The TB response can only be as good as the health-care systems through which it is implemented, and health-care systems are only as good as the structures that hold them to account. Community-based structures such as “clinic committees” ensure accountability while also fostering partnership and trust between communities and their health-care systems. Grassroots civil society and community-based organisations also ensure accountability. Such organisations are indispensable and would thrive on comparatively small amounts of funding. Accountability is a necessary condition for success. We must recognise that it is owed to communities, not donors or international institutions, and fund their efforts to ensure it.
•People with TB do not need to be watched, they need to be heard. People with TB are saying they want what anyone wants — including health and dignity. The shiny allure of surveillance technology threatens to distract us from the real work of the TB response; work that involves partnering with communities to employ human-rights based strategies to beat TB.
📰 GoM to form sub-panel on harassment
•The Group of Ministers (GoM) formed in the wake of the #MeToo campaign on social media decided at its first meeting on Monday to constitute a sub-committee that will suggest changes to the law on prevention of sexual harassment at workplace as well as ways to strengthen the National Commission for Women.
•The sub-committee will comprise officials from the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Women and Child Development and Ministry of Law and Justice. It will be given 10 days to submit its report, according to a government source who requested anonymity.
•In response to a question on measures the government could take to ensure the effectiveness of Internal Committees (IC) appointed to probe complaints of workplace harassment, the source said that the sub-panel will have to examine which body can be empowered to penalise employers if they don’t abide by the law on setting up ICs.
•“While the Sexual Harassment at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 (or POSH Act 2013) provides for the setting up of ICs, it doesn’t mention who will penalise employers if they fail to comply. It lays down a fine of ₹50,000, but there is no clarity on which authority can impose that,” the source said.
•The senior official said that if NCW is assigned the responsibility of imposing penalties on organisations or employers, then it will have to be empowered and appointed as an appellate authority.
•The GoM was appointed in late October, days after the then Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar was forced to resign after sexual harassment charges.
•The NCW Act of 1990 empowers the Commission to issue summons, seek production of documents and examine witnesses. It doesn’t have the power to order imprisonment or impose a fine. According to a former NCW official, the body is not even authorised to demand a copy of an IC probe report.
•The POSH Act too doesn’t lay down any role for NCW. However, it gives powers to the “appropriate government” to seek information from an employer or district authority and authorise inspection of records in cases of sexual harassment at an organisation.
📰 Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates likely to be inducted in next three years
Rear Admiral Dinesh K. Tripathi says two will be built in Russia and two at Goa Shipyard
•The first of the four Admiral Grigorovich-class (Project 11356) guided missile stealth frigates is likely to be inducted into the Indian Navy in the next three years.
•This was disclosed by Rear Admiral Dinesh K Tripathi, Flag Officer Commanding, Eastern Fleet, here on Monday.
•In an informal chat with The Hindu, after addressing a joint press meet, as part of the ongoing INDRA-NAVY-18, the bilateral maritime exercise between Indian Navy and Russian Federation Navy, that began on Sunday, he said two of the frigates that are advanced version of the Indian Talwar-class guided missile frigates, will be built in Russia’s Baltic Coast Yantar Shipyard and the remaining two will be built at Goa Shipyard on technology transfer.
•It is learnt that the Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates will have an array of weapon system that include artillery guns, strike missile and radar-controlled air defence systems with provisions for torpedo tubes.
•Sources also said that the 4,000-odd tonne frigates can be armed with Brahmos cruise missile system.
Medium refit
•On Russia-India defence cooperation it is understood that right now two Sindhughosh-class submarines, reportedly Sindhukesari and Sindhuraj, are undergoing medium refit at a shipyard in Russia and post which the active operational lifespan of the subs will be enhanced for a further period of 7 to 10 years. The combat power of the Kilo-class diesel-electric submarines will also be enhanced substantially after the refit.
•It is also understood that a second Akula-class nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN), may also be leased to India by the Russian Federation Navy. India already operates a leased Akula-class SSN, INS Chakra, which is based at Eastern Naval Command.
Enhanced cooperation
•Speaking about cooperation between the two countries, Rear Admiral Mikhailov Edward Evgenievich, Chief of the Headquarters, Submarine Forces, Pacific Fleet, of Russian Federation Navy, said that both the countries envisage a common goal of more security and stability in the oceans and such bilateral exercise will further deepen such cooperation.
•He also said that both the countries have conducted such exercises in the past involving the tri-services, and such roles involving the submarines is envisaged in the future.
•The INDRA NAVY – 18 began on Sunday, and after the harbour phase, the sea phase will be held from December 13 to 16. While the ships from Russian Federation Navy, include Destroyer Admiral Panteleyev, guided missile cruiser Varyag and fleet tanker Boris Butoma, the India flotilla include INS Ranvir, a guided missile destroyer, INS Satpura, an indigenous frigate, INS Kadmatt, an indigenous anti- submarine warfare (ASW) corvette, IN Ships Kuthar and Khanjar both indigenous missile corvettes and INS Jyoti, a fleet tanker, various fighter and reconnaissance aircraft, helicopters and submarines.
•Apart from conferences, profession interactions, cultural visits, the exercise will also focus on anti-submarine warfare (ASW), air defence drills, surface firings and search and seizure operations.
📰 Kaiga power station-1 creates a world record yet again
Records longest uninterrupted operation of 941 days; PM terms it a ‘major feat’
•Karnataka’s Kaiga has once again made the country proud by creating a world record for the longest uninterrupted operation for 941 days, thereby breaking the earlier record of 940 days by the United Kingdom.
•In appreciation of the achievement, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted on Monday congratulating the Indian scientists and engineers, terming it a major feat.
•Heysham-2 Unit-8 of the U.K. had held the earlier record of the longest uninterrupted operation (940 days) among all nuclear power reactors (of all technologies) in the world. Kaiga Generating Station (KGS-1) equalled the world record on Sunday and broke it on Monday, thus creating history. While KGS-1 is a Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR), Heysham-2 Unit-8 is an Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (AGR).
•In an official release issued on Monday from Mumbai, Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL), has said that the achievement demonstrates that the nation’s capability in nuclear power generation technology of PHWR had fully matured and proved the excellence in design, construction, safety, quality and operation and maintenance practices of NPCIL.
•On October 25 this year, KGS-1 had broken the earlier world record for longest uninterrupted operation among PWRS held by Pickering-7 (Ontario) in Canada which operated for 894 days and few hours. Pickering-7’s record created on October 7, 1994 was broken by KGS-1 after 24 years.
•KGS-1 at Kaiga, located 56 km from Karwar has been generating electricity continuously since May 13, 2016. It isan indigenously-built PHWR run by domestic fuel (uranium). It began commercial operations on November 16, 2000, and has produced 500 cr. units of power so far. In June, KGS-1 had set a national record for continuous operation of 766 days.
•According to official sources, KGS-1 will be shutdown for maintenance on December 30. Nuclear power reactors undergo mandatory checks and have to get clearance from the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board to continue operations.
📰 ‘Many combination drugs not approved by regulator’
Study raises safety, efficacy concerns; call for ban of irrational formulations
•Of the 110 anti-TB (tuberculosis) Fixed Dose Combinations (FDCs) available in India, only 32 (less than 30%) have been approved by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), the country’s drug regulator. In the case of malaria FDCs, only eight out of 20 (40%), have been approved.
•These statistics, that give rise to safety and efficacy concerns, have been brought out in a study published online in the journal Tropical Medicine and International Health by researchers from the Manipal College of Pharmaceutical Sciences.
•An FDC or combination product is a formulation with more than one active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) in a fixed ratio of doses formulated into a single dosage form.
Proportion, sales
•Aimed at assessing the proportion and sales of unapproved FDCs of anti-tubercular, antimalarial and antiretroviral (anti-HIV/AIDS) medicines available in India, the study analysed the available FDCs for these diseases and screened them against the CDSCO database of approved FDCs.
•Swapnil J. Dengale from the Department of Pharmaceutical Quality Assurance in the Manipal College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, the corresponding author of the study, told The Hindu that “an opaque regulatory framework and ambiguity over licensing powers have contributed to the problem. The rationality of unapproved FDCs should be reviewed and irrational formulations should be banned.”
•“As of April, the CDSCO had approved 1,288 FDCs. This is disproportionately high compared with the availability in a tightly regulated market like USFDA, which has only a few hundred approved FDCs.”
•Pointing out that even the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) list of essential medicines mentions only 24 FDCs, Dr. Dengale said: “It is unfortunate that a majority of approved FDCs in the Indian market are irrational and lack scientific justification. The scientific rigour of the CDSCO in approving these FDCs has been questioned time and again in Parliamentary and academic reports”
•The study quoted the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare, which in its 59th report in 2012, pointed out multiple deficiencies in the CDSCO’s approval process for FDCs. It highlighted institutional problems such as understaffing, lack of skills, and inadequate infrastructure. “However, the most significant observation concerned the issuance of manufacturing licenses by the State Licensing Authority without the prior clearance of the Drug Controller General of India DCG(I), the head of CDSCO. This is the main problem,” he said.
•The problem of unapproved FDCs mainly affects those who get treated in the private sector. “In the absence of a strong pharmacovigilance mechanism in India, there is no data on adverse events of these unapproved FDCs,” the authors added.
📰 Don’t believe the anti-GMO campaign
GM crops have reduced pesticide use, increased yields and profits, and cause no health hazards
•A review article, “Modern technologies for sustainable food and nutrition security”, which appeared in the November 25 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Current Science, is deeply worrying. The article was authored by geneticist P.C. Kesavan and leading agriculture scientist M.S. Swaminathan and describes Bt cotton as a “failure”. As the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, K. VijayRaghavan, rightly said, this paper is “deeply flawed”. It has the potential to mislead the public and the political system.
Rely on scientific evidence
•While the general public can be easily swayed by unauthenticated reports, the authors, as scientists, should have relied on hardcore scientific evidence before making such adverse comments. The statement that “only in very rare circumstance (less than 1%) may there arise a need for the use of this technology [GM]” is not in consonance with their other statements such as the one in the concluding paragraph: “Genetic engineering technology has opened up new avenues of molecular breeding. However, their potential undesirable impacts will have to be kept in view. What is important is not to condemn or praise any technology, but choose the one which can take us to the desired goal sustainably, safely and economically.” Professor Swaminathan also said in a response to the criticism of the article: “Genetic modification is the technology of choice for solving abiotic problems like drought flood, salinity, etc. It may not be equally effective in the case of biotic stresses since new strains of pests and diseases arise all the time. This is why MSSRF [M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation] chose mangrove for providing genes for tolerance to salinity.”
•Abiotic stress in crops is a major hazard and does not fall under the less than 1% category mentioned in the review article. Major science academies of the world such as the U.S.’s National Academy of Sciences, the African Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy have supported GM technology. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, after a massive consultation process, published a 420-page report in 2016 with the observation that “Bt in maize and cotton from 1996 to 2015 contributed to a reduction in the gap between actual yield and potential yield under circumstances in which targeted pests caused substantial damage to non-GE varieties and synthetic chemicals could not provide practical control”.
•In 2016, 107 Nobel laureates signed a letter challenging Greenpeace to drop its anti-genetically modified organism (GMO) technology stance. They stated that the anti-GMO campaign is scientifically baseless and potentially harmful to poor people in the developing world. Data from a large number of peer-reviewed publications have shown that, on average, GM technology adoption has reduced pesticide use by 37%, increased crop yield by 22%, and increased farmer profits by 68% (“A Meta-Analysis of the Impacts of Genetically Modified Crops”, published in PLOS One by Wilhelm Klümper and Matin Qaim in 2014). Yield gains and pesticide reductions are larger for insect-resistant crops than for herbicide-tolerant crops. Yield and profit gains are higher in developing countries than in developed countries. Data from a billion animals fed on GM corn have not indicated any health hazards. Those in the Americas and elsewhere consuming Bt corn or soybean for over 15 years have not reported any health issues. It is preposterous to think that governments would allow their people and animals to be fed “poisonous” food. Even reports based on faulty studies in experimental animals that stated that GMOs cause cancer were withdrawn. Major food safety authorities of the world have rejected these findings.
Not a failure in India
•Bt cotton is not a failure in India. The yields hovering around 300 kg/ha at the time of introduction of Bt cotton (2002) have increased to an average of over 500 kg/ha, converting India from a cotton-importing country to the largest exporter of raw cotton. There was a small dip for a couple of years and the yield has now increased to over 550 kg/ha. The question to be asked is, what would have the yield been if Bt cotton had not been introduced in 2002?
•It is unfortunate that farmer distress is being wrongly attributed to Bt cotton failure. Farmers continue to grow Bt cotton. The development of resistance can be tackled through practices like Integrated Pest Management and by stacking Bt genes to fight secondary pests. The priority is to accelerate development of Bt cotton varieties that can be packed densely in fields and increase the yields to over 800 kg/ha, as is the case with other countries.
•GM mustard (DMH-11) is a technology to create mustard hybrids. Being a self-pollinator, mustard is difficult to hybridise through conventional methods. Genetic modification allows different parents to be combined easily, helping yields go up substantially. The herbicide glyphosate is only used for selection of hybrids and is not meant for farmer fields. In any case, reports on the probable carcinogenic potential of the herbicide have not been accepted by major science academies. Yield data can only be assessed in farmers’ fields. For this, trials are necessary. The question then is: why are the trials being scuttled? The moratorium on Bt brinjal is the most unfortunate step taken by the government in 2010 and has crippled the entire field of research and development with transgenic crops. Bangladesh has used India’s data to successfully cultivate Bt brinjal, despite all the negative propaganda. Reports indicate that as many as 6,000 Bangladeshi farmers cultivated Bt brinjal in 2017. How long will it take for
Bt brinjal to enter India from Bangladesh?
•India has one of the strongest regulatory protocols for field trials of GM crops. Many scientists have been part of the monitoring processes, and it is an insult to the integrity of our scientists to indict the Review Committee on Genetic Manipulation and the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee as lacking in expertise and having vested interests. The paper by Dr. Kesavan and Dr. Swaminathan seems to have got most things wrong for whatever reason. GM technology is not a magic bullet. It needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. There is definitely scope for improvement in terms of technology and regulatory protocols. But it is time to deregulate the Bt gene and lift the embargo on Bt brinjal. A negative review from opinion-makers can only mislead the country. In the end, it is India that will be the loser.
