India is working on a ”national crop designing strategy” to improve nutrition, yield and insect resistance levels of a wide range of key crops. It plans to do this not through the use of genetically modified, or GM crops, but by identifying the right parents for future generations of the crop. Over the next four months, a committee headed by Deepak Pental, a geneticist and vice-chancellor, University of Delhi, will prepare a report on this, which will also identify experts who can create better crops. This will be done by picking parents with the required genetic make up, a process called marker assisted selection (or MAS).