GMO In India

Introduction

Agriculture is demographically the broadest economic sector in India which accounts for approximately 13.7% GDP and 50% of the workforce (approx. 600 mil). The conventional technology currently in usage is not self-sufficient for the ever-growing population. It also requires usage of pesticides and insecticides which deteriorates the environment. Owing to the GM crops' high productivity, low pesticides and insecticides usage, drought resistance and high nutritional quality, we took the task of exploring more about the GM technology and creating awareness on both the fronts, pros and cons.

Currently in India, 93% of cotton grown is Bt cotton. There are several crops incl. rice, maize, mustard etc. are under field trials, with a huge ongoing debate scrutinizing its biosafety levels. For a new GM crop to be introduced, it has to go through many regulatory processes by the government.

Since most of the population is unaware about GM technology, we tried to understand the advantages and disadvantages of GM crops along with how it is tested for safety in India. This prompted us to investigate GMO related issues by reaching out to it's stakeholders, general public (consumers and farmers), NGOs and regulatory authorities. Our objectives were to answer following questions:

1. What percent of general public have heard of GMO and are aware of it's economical, technical and political implications?

2. What is the perception of public regarding the consumption of GM foods?

3. What do people believe as better in GM patenting regime of the country?

4. What makes a person opt for GM food consumption? Is it better knowledge and understanding of GM?

Considering these, we designed our survey. We conducted our survey in colleges of four different states with the help of SVCE Chennai, IISc Banglore, IIT Delhi and IIT Kharagpur (total 330 responses). We surveyed undergraduates, post graduates and professors across various departments and later on categorized them into two groups Biotechnology related and non-Biotechnology related departments. We also made sure that we have enough responses in each category. You can view the survey questionnaire here.

An application for approval of a GMO in india has to go through the following committees:

IBSC: Institutional Biosafety committee

RCGM: Review Committee on Genetic Manipulations

MEC: Monitoring cum Evaluation Committee

GEAC: Genetic Engineering Approval Committee

ICAR: Indian Council of Agricultural Research

Analysis

We believe that GM crops/foods would be a very important part of our life in the future, if not today. Genetic Modification technology would be developed to an extent that all of us would be satisfied with its technical, economical and political implications. In that regime, we believe that the answers to all of our questions would be 'YES'. Therefore, we have looked at the patterns, which give us 'YES' answers in our questionnaire. The percentage of people responding 'YES' have been color coded like: 0-40% red, 40-70% yellow, 70-100% green. In this way, we can also estimate that how close are we to go green! We found interesting results in accordance with our hypothesis. We had divided our participants into six groups: Undergraduates, Graduates and Professors, each from Biotech or non-Biotech. A comprehensive analysis of our results can be obtained here. Below is the tag cloud representation of the comments, which we received in our survey.

General Public

Our country, India has been progressively adopting GM crops, which has led to a heated debate in our country. This prompted us to investigate GMO related issues by reaching out to it's stakeholders, general public (consumers and farmers), NGOs and regulatory authorities. We conducted a survey among undergraduates, graduates and professors (330 responses) of colleges in four states of India. We interviewed two highly vocal NGOs, Gene Campaign & ASHA, and two members of GMO related decision making government body. To educate farmers about GM crops and its implications, we prepared a write-up in their local languages, and circulated it among farmers using social media. In order to spread awareness in public sphere about Synthetic Biology, we made a mobile game 'Codonut' (released on the App Store and the Google Play store) to educate players about the concept of codon bias. We also organised an interactive synthetic biology session for students in a high school near our campus and primary school students in a village in Maharashtra.

Non-Government Organizations

Dr. Suman Sahai, Chairperson, Gene Campaign

Dr. Suman Sahai, has had a distinguished scientific career in the field of genetics, was awarded the Padma Shri in 2011. In 2004 she received the Borlaug Award for her outstanding contribution to agriculture and the environment. Dr. Sahai has a Ph.D. in genetics and has served on the faculties of the University of Alberta, University of Chicago, and the University of Heidelberg. She was appointed Knight of the Golden Ark (Netherlands) in 2001 for generating awareness about the importance of genetic resources to food security. Dr. Sahai is founder Chairperson of the Gene Campaign which is a leading research and advocacy organization, working on issues relating to food, nutrition and livelihoods. Her Claims and reasoning: Thorough testing of GM; Rain harvesting; Not ideologically opposed to the use of genetically engineered crops, but she believes that the Indian government regulates them poorly.

Kavitha Kuruganti, ASHA Convener

She is one of the conveners of ASHA Kisan Swaraj Alliance (Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture), which is a network of people committed to a cause (not an NGO). She is a part of the not-for-profit social enterprise that seeks to revive organic Indian cotton in a garment value chain called TULA.

Her activities : Protest against the govt. Permission to Monsanto for open field trials. Her claims and reasoning against GM are:

1. Transgenics are unsustainable and incompatible with agro-ecological, organic farming, apart from being potentially detrimental to consumer health and conservation of biodiversity as one of the bedrocks of economic and ecological sustainability.
2. Control of seeds into the monopolistic hands of a few multinational seed corporations.
3. The unproven claims of benefits of GM crops are not needed.
4. No direct benefit to consumers.
5. GM crops are largely unsustainable in their reliance on external, non-renewable inputs.
6. Precision of genetic engineering has been shown to be a myth by many scientific studies.
7. More use of insecticides because of superweeds.
8. A continuous production of insecticide reduces soil microbial activity.
9. GMs are a diversion to a problem, which solution already exists.
10. A thorough experimentation should be performed before putting the GM crops into the environment.
11. Lack of transparency in giving nod to GM Mustard by Delhi University.

Our Questions

GM Specific
1.What’s your stand on Genetically Modified Foods/Crops?
2.Which GM Crops are being cultivated in India at present?
3.How profitable these GM Crops are to farmers, consumers and environment in India?
4.What are the alternatives to boost the production and nutritional quality of crops?
5.What is the level of awareness among the stakeholders of GM Foods/Crops in the country?
6.Do you believe CRISPR/Cas can improve GM techniques to counter arguments that they aren’t precise and/or unsustainable? If not CRISPR/Cas any other technologies(biotechnologies) which you feel can improve agriculture in a sustainable fashion?

Policy Specific
1.Could you highlight few important regulations on the cultivation of GM crops in India? How do you rate them?
2.Implementation of GM plants in fields would require huge confident in the technology? How does our govt. policy ensure this?
3.What is your opinion on the recent case of GM Mustard developed by Delhi University?
4.Do you believe GM foods should be labelled separately as GMO food for the sake of consumers?
5.Indian govt. doesn’t allow patents on genetically modified organisms. So, how do multinational companies like Monsanto xdo their businesses and could still monopolize the market?

Genetic Engineering Approval Committee, India

Dr. Sesikeran, former chairman of RCGM (Review committee on Genetic manipulation- India), former director of NIN (National Institute of Nutrition). He was one of the prominent persons involved in approving of GMO related research/products in india. He was kind enough to have a conversation with us through mobile phone. He was answering our questions in both ethical and technical ways.

1. How do you ensure the reliability of GMOs as genetic modifications are uncertain and can possibly affect the genetic makeup of them/other interfering organisms?

In earlier days also genetic manipulations were done in labs which involved getting random mutations by radiation. Now better technologies to specifically modify a gene have been developed which is surprisingly becoming more questionable among the society. Artificial human insulin which is saving the life of many diabetic patients is also a product of a GMO which has not got into any heated debates. With this we can understand the scope of genetic engineering techniques to the mankind and should deal with things more scientifically. (The basic tests done to ensure the stability of the gene in an organism is discussed in the following questions). Talking about ‘jumping of genes’ or horizontal gene transfer from one organism to another, it is a theoretical phenomenon (observed in labs between microorganisms) which is not observed practically in crop fields.

2. How the effect of GMOs on the environment such as soil and other flora and fauna is estimated?

Some of the foreign countries have grown GM crops for years and have not been reported with any considerable harmful effects. This gives us the motivation to start with the discussion of conducting field trials to assess the long term effects in India.As part of regular approval process extent of pollen transfer, soil nutrition analysis, effect on useful bees and insects and so many other tests are performed in confined fields. Before going into analyzing the effects on soil, the crop is grown for 3-4 generations for achieving gene stability of the inserted gene in a location. Multi Location studies are done. GEAC seeks data of two levels of biosafety research trials for 3 crop season in different locations (usually 15 locations- 5 locations per crop season*3). For one location only one trial is conducted.

3. If somebody comes up with an effective new GM crop with certain benefits, they also come with unknown risks so could you please comment on the risk-benefit analysis being done to get to a conclusion before proceeding with the research?

Frequent usage of mobile phones has the potential hazard of leading to brain tumors but still it is introduced and used by almost all as the percentage of risk associated is very less. Here the benefits outweigh the risks. We analyze the risks associated with an organism by looking at things like whether it has got a foreign protein due to modification. ‘Compositional equivalence’ (compositional analysis with the non GM counterpart) is done to ensure that gene modifications and not leading to secretion of any other hazardous proteins. Other studies like ground water pollutant level, toxicity analysis is also done to ensure safety. We go further and approve a crop if the benefits of it outweigh the possible risks which are highly improbable.

4. 'As farmers are the main gain takers of GM crops with its comparative high yield, how do you ensure that they are well aware about what they are cultivating?

[kvks- http://krishi.icar.gov.in/Index.jsp Krishi] vigyan kendras are set up to aware the farmers and provide them information about seed variety, kind of insects attacking a particular crop, and many field demonstrations.

5. We also spoke with members of Gene campaign and Asha, one of their main concerns was there are other safe cultivation methods which could be effective if implemented properly. Please comment on the necessity of GM crops.

Other yield increasing cultivation methods involve hybrids where random characters are mixed and getting our favourable character is uncertain. It is time consuming and not efficient. No other methods have produced insecticidal and high yielding crops like GM technology.

6. How do you tackle insect developing resistance to the crop’s killing nature due to insecticidal crops?

This problem of insects developing resistance is existing from olden days even with use of pesticides. Only a small population of the insects were found to develop resistance and there comes an issue if they start to transfer those genes either horizontally or vertically. One of the effective ways is to cultivate a very small percentage of non-bt crop over the perimeter of the land where bt crop is cultivated. Thereby reducing the chance of resistant genes being transferred to large part of the population. This method was found effective and other methods like using a small percentage of pesticides is also done.

7. As 70% of the population of india is involved in agriculture, should patenting of crops be promoted?

This is still under discussion where a balance should be made between protecting the intellectual rights of an innovator and the farmers from paying high amount of money for their seeds. If patenting is allowed, at first, GM seeds will be comparably costlier than non- GM but it is expected as it’s output are comparatively high. Talking about reduction in efficiency levels in some areas of india (Bt cotton issue), GM crops are highly target specific. It kills only certain species of insects. It might not be effective in certain locations as the pests might vary.

The talk was very informative and it helped us in explaining to the public about GMOs in an effective manner.

Education & Awareness

Teaching synthetic biology to high school students

Education with fun in Vana vani Matriculation school, chennai, Tamil Nadu, India To expand the synthetic biology community, we believed it’s necessary to create interest in the fundamental stage itself. We went to a school in our locality and interacted with our fellow student community in 12th grade. They all had their major as biology but still they were overwhelmed to know that they can engineer life!

We started with the very basic of DNA, as a source of information written in the language of cells which has only four letters and went to central dogma with proteins as meaning of the words created by those letters. Several analogies made by us like ‘RNA as a photocopy of a particular page in a book’ made them understand well about the concepts. After this we went on to restriction enzymes which cut at palindromic sequences.

Activity: We made a simple activity to make them understand a palindromic sequence. A set of letters were given (say ‘AGACTT’) and the teams were asked to come up with as many palindromic sequences as they can with those letters. Many teams came up with many answers but actually one found out that it is just a simple math! With this we made sure that they understood the basics of complementary base pairing and reverse complementary matching of palindromic sequences.

Atlast the students were told what synthetic biologists are capable of and were asked to come up with some fun applications. We found our future IGEMers as their answers really amused us like glowing roadside trees, toxin detection using fluorescence and many more!

An awareness drive was conducted at the local Government school of Hasampura, a small village in the district Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, India. Almost all the students of the school came from families with farming and agriculture background. The students were made aware of the importance of science in their life and how crucial it can be when GM crops are introduced at a large scale in the agricultural fields. Various parameters were discussed with them which included the quantity of GM seeds, amount of manure and fertiliser used, nutritional value, cost calculations, insecticides and pesticides usage etc, which were then compared with the conventional technology currently used. Various governmental policies regarding GM crops were also discussed. The students responded well and conveyed the message to their parents. In this way, we were able to spread awareness about the importance of GM crops and how can it revolutionize their lives.

Educating farmers and public

We made a pamphlet explaining the concept of GM crops(benefits, adverse effects) from a neutral point of view. We also translated the pamphlet into the local language of our state(Tamil), and posted it on a Facebook group. You can view both files [Iitm_gmtam.pdf here].