Kafka might have envied the script. In Delhi, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar informed the Rajya Sabha on May 7 that there had been just six farmers’ suicides in Vidarbha since January. The same day, same time in Maharashtra, Chief Minister Ashok Chavan said that figure was 343. That is, 57 times greater than Mr. Pawar’s count. Mr. Chavan was speaking in Vidarbha. Mr. Pawar’s numbers came in a written reply to a question in Parliament.

The proliferation of BT brinjal around the village has led to a fall in yield of this exotic crop, grown in about 750 acres in a geographical area lying between Udyavar river in the east and Swarna river in the west. [...] The agriculture department had carried out surveillance and awareness campaign in the area against bio-contamination. “Our crops are getting pest infestations, leaf cutters (green jiggy jocids) and white fleas, which ruin the plants. These pests were the results of new varieties of egg plants (new types of brinjals) being promoted by the seed companies, I have gone to other fields across the Swarna river, where I found the farmers were growing genetically modified brinjals” said Vasudeva Bhat, a grower.

In recent years, U.S. based multinational Monsanto has successfully penetrated the seed fibre market in India and is offering a tantalizing pest-resistant species of genetically modified cotton, Bacillus Thuringiensis, otherwise known as Bt cotton. With higher yields, and less pesticide usage as selling points, farmers in growing regions around the country have switched to Bt cotton. Bollworm, a common pest, is what motivated farmers to switch to Bt cotton, but now, new pests are emerging as bollworm is developing resistances to Bt cotton.

The future of bio-technology in the agriculture sector will depend on the ability of farm scientists to convince people about its benefits, noted farm scientist M S Swaminathan said today. “Future of biotechnology will depend upon our ability to convince the people about how this science can provide a new dimension to agriculture,” Swaminathan said here. [...] For the private firms engaged in producing genetically modified seeds, the eminent farm scientist said there was a difference between spending on public relations and spending on public information.

Bollgard III, a three-gene Bt cotton technology, will help farmers to earn better returns as it would enable them to increase their productivity from the same acreage, decrease their expenses on pesticides sprays and use resources efficiently. The new technology, which is still in regulatory phase, is being developed by Mahyco Monsanto Biotech, a 50:50 Joint Venture between Mahyco and Monsanto Holdings Private Limited. MMB currently markets Bollgard and Bollgard II Bt cotton technologies to seed companies.

The claim of the Indian Govt. that farmer suicides have dropped drastically in the current year due to government initiatives is misleading, as the country is experiencing a severe agrarian crisis due to crop failure in the major suicide-prone states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. This is because there is severe cotton, soybean and paddy crop failure and the spiral of farm suicides has restarted and the on-the-ground situation is very grim, as debt and distress are forcing innocent farmers to kill themselves

[Child labour rules] leave out some of the occupations that are the biggest employers of children: agriculture and fisheries. These have presumably been left out to preclude children from being stopped from working on their own family farms. But increasingly this has meant that child laborers are smuggled across states to work on Bt cotton farms in India’s largest cotton producing states of Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. According to a study by Davuri Venkateswarlu for the International Labour Rights Forum, 29.8% of the workforce in Andhra Pradesh’s cotton fields were under 14 and 70.6% were girls, in 2009-10. In Gujarat, 24.6% of the workforce were under 14 and 62.7% were girls.

As vast tracts of cotton fields in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra turn into a suicide belt for farmers, there is increasing worry that the dizzying speed of technological change, both in seeds and pesticides, is leading to a critical problem for Indian farmers. Ever since GM or Bt cotton made its debut in 2002, farmers have been on a technology treadmill that is robbing them of their traditional agricultural wisdom that had earlier stood them in good stead. And scientists and academic researchers are warning that this is at the heart of the problem plaguing cotton cultivators, specially in rain-fed areas of the country where farmers have been trapped in a spiral of increasingly high input costs, although the success of the crop is dependent on the vagaries of the monsoon.

India is badly in need of a second green revolution, according to Prime Minister [...] the success story of Argentina is worth recalling here. In a short span of twenty years (1990-2010), Argentina has become a force to reckon with in oilseeds and food grains. [...] It was the adoption of genetically modified soybean seeds, no till planting that helped raised production. [...] It helped reduce soybean farming costs into half, and brought more marginal areas into cultivation. Corn yields doubled while Wheat yields rose 50%. Soybean expanded and even replaced grains in the Pampas due to high profitability.

Opposition to introduction of Bt brinjal [...] is due to the interest of chemical pesticide manufacturers, who apprehend monetary losses in the event of introduction of this genetically engineered crop, says a pioneer in the field of genetically engineered crops, Alex K Gaponenko, from the Koltzov Institute of Developmental Biology, RAS, Moscow. [He] told TOI that genetically engineered crop is the only viable alternative to feed the ever increasing population of the world, which traditional seeds cannot cater.