There is an urgent need to assess the potential of genetically modified crops as these are nutrient-enriched, drought- and disease-resistant varieties, an expert said here Tuesday at an international conference. Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere, director of International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, said: “On the Bt Brinjal issue, everybody should be guided by science, not by sentiments or emotions.”

An interview with Khan's about his new film, "Peepli Live," which explores the deadly consequences of India's shift to a neo-liberal economic model. [...] The vast majority of the world's second most populated country still farms for a living, but are caught between deep debt and the erratic nature of seasonal change. Lured by the promise of greater production, farmers are pressured into mortgaging their farms to purchase genetically modified seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer from American companies like Monsanto.

Reacting to reports on the Cabinet clearance given to the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India Bill, members of the Coalition for a GM-Free India strongly reiterated that this Bill should be stopped in its tracks. Repeating that this Bill has a pro-industry, anti-people mandate to set up a clearing house for approving GMOs in our food and farming, they said that they would step up pressure on the Government of India to discard this 'wrong bill by the wrong people for the wrong reasons'.

For the first time since suspending Bt brinjal, a decision that pitted him against the biotech industry, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh shared a platform with the industry’s leaders who are seeking to reconnect with him. Ramesh, however, set the record straight: “For food security, genetically modified crops are not the only route but they are an important component. The Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India Bill is a huge step forward for the integrity of environmental assessment process, safety, efficacy and public interest.”

The Biotechnology Regulatory Authority bill, scheduled to be introduced in Parliament imminently, will not open the floodgates to genetically modified (GM) food. Infact, it has maintained the integrity of both the environmental assessment process and the public consultation process, environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh said today.

A central government committee has taken action against a Hyderabad institute for carrying out an experiment to create India's first genetically modified (GM) chickens in violation of government rules. When a government panel found the experiment was conducted without proper bio-safety conditions, it ordered the destruction of the GM chickens [...] In all, 263 chicks were hatched for the experiment of which 16 were found positive for the gene protein. Of these, seven died earlier, and the committee ordered the remaining nine - seven males and two females - be destroyed by autoclaving.

In the village of Danapur in Eastern India, villager Rita says she has had nothing to feed her son for four days. [...] Yet the government has record amounts of surplus stocks: 59 million tons of wheat and rice. It does have a huge public distribution system that provides free food to families below the poverty line. But corruption and complex bureaucracy means the poorest of the poor often don't make it onto the list.

Why do MNCs excite extreme emotions in India? If you take any one of them from banks to pharma and chemicals to defence and aerospace, they are all clubbed together with the “usual suspects” who do more harm than good despite all the good intentions they might have had. Is it because technology is always a double-edged weapon that we understand so little of, or because the numerous variables and different parameters have unintended consequences that cannot possibly be anticipated?

Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Co., an Indian seed breeder partly owned by Monsanto Co., plans to develop the country’s first genetically modified wheat and rice in the next three to five years, a company official said. The company is working on various traits of genetically altered grains that can withstand drought and salinity, Usha Barwale Zehr, the chief technology officer at Mahyco, said in a telephone interview yesterday. India’s government in February rejected the nation’s first gene-modified food, brinjal, or eggplant, after protests by farmers.

Crop biotech major Monsanto and its Indian partner Mahyco [...] are conducting trials of a new variety of GM cotton in which Bollgard II has been integrated with Monsanto’s round up ready flex technology to give farmers better weed control in Bt cotton fields. [...] ”We hope to generate all data required for the regulatory approval by early 2011,” Gyanendra Shukla, director of Monsanto told Deccan Herald here. The new GM cotton will allow farmers to spray a Monsanto’s proprietary weed-killer, Round up, most parts of the season.