Govind Gujar: entomologist's journey to understand the Society we live in

The Government of India has set an ambitious target for itself. Hon'ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi advocated this target of Doubling Farmers' Income by 2022. Farm distress has affected everyone; with farmers taking to streets, some died due to suicides too, the Opposition cornering the Government inside and outside the Parliament, and the Government waiving off the loans and promising more to the farmers. I attended a seminar last week on "Minimum Support Price for Crops" and "Agri-Export Policy" on 3rd April at India Habitat Centre, another thinktank place in New Delhi. This was organized by the Indian Council of Food and Agriculture, not to be confused with Indian Council of Agricultural Research. The former is a thinktank, an NGO that also supports policies and commerce directly and indirectly. Minimum Support Price (MSP) for crop produce was a concept introduced in 1970s to support the farmers with minimum price of their produce guaranteed by the Go...

Pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella) was a key pest of cotton prior to introduction of GM cotton. This pest infests only flowers and bolls. It feeds inside the bolls and seeds inside. As GM cotton expresses less toxin in floral and bolls, the larvae ingest sublethal doses. This pest has acquired resistance to Bt cotton. As early as 2004, we started work on efficacy of Bt toxins against Pink bollworm larvae. We found resistance development in the Amreli population of pink bollworm to Bt toxin, Cry1Ac in 2009 and published our studies in early 2011. A year before, Monsanto in its press release extensively reported up on the pink bollworm resistance to Bt cotton. However, the official establishments did not take a serious note of that. On the contrary, they said that Monsanto wants to promote BGII (that produces two-toxins Cry1Ac and Cry2Ab) and hence, this is a strategy to malign Bt cotton that produces only one-toxin Cry1Ac. Associated with this is a fact that native seed companies...