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Harish Damodaran

NEW DELHI, April 17

THE Centre has finalised eight locations in the northern region for conducting official trials of the Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Ltd's (Mahyco) Bt cotton in the current kharif season.

The eight locations — Faridkot and Abohar in Punjab, Hissar and Sirsa in Haryana, Sriganganagar and Banswara in Rajasthan and Modipuram and Mathura in Uttar Pradesh — have been identified following a recent meeting between the Union Agriculture Minister, Mr Ajit Singh, and the Director-General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Dr Punjab Singh.

``ICAR will carry out detailed open field evaluation trials of Mahyco's Bt cotton in these eight locations under the All-India Coordinated Cotton Improvement Project (AICCIP). Mahyco has already made available the seeds of its Mech-915 Bt hybrid for the trials this season. Once the trials are completed, farmers in the region would be in a position to plant them during the 2003 kharif season'', official sources said.

Business Line on April 2 reported that farmers in the North would not be able to cultivate Bt cotton in the current season. The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), in its meeting on March 26, had approved the commercial release of only three of Mahyco's Bt cotton hybrids — Mech-12, Mech-162 and Mech-184. These were cleared based on the results of successful trials carried by ICAR in the central and southern regions.

But in the case of the fourth hybrid (Mech-915), which was specifically meant for the northern States, GEAC did not grant approval in the absence of official field trials. The trials had not taken place because ICAR was given the mandate to supervise the open field trials of the Bt cotton hybrids only in mid-June last year.

``By then, it was too late to conduct trials in the North because cotton is sown there during April-May. And since we were supplied only the seeds of Mech-162, Mech-184 and Mech-12, our exercise was limited to these hybrids and to the Central and South zones (where sowing extends from late-June to August)'', according to the Deputy Director-General, ICAR, Dr Mangla Rai.

The GEAC's decision not to allow commercial planting of Bt cotton in the northern region this season has been a major source of embarrassment to the concerned State Governments. Considering that the overall crop damage caused by the American bollworm in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan alone last year was estimated at 15.50 lakh bales (valued at Rs 1,363.61 crore), a lot of hope and hype had been generated over Bt cotton amongst the region's beleaguered cotton growers.

As realisation dawned over Mahyco's wonder hybrids not being cleared for commercial cultivation in the northern States, there has been virtual panic, with even reports coming in of cotton growers in the region illegally sourcing Bt seeds from Gujarat and Maharashtra for planting in the current season itself.

ICAR's field experiments last year were conducted in six locations in the

Central zone — Khandwa (Madhya Pradesh), Akola and Nanded (Maharashtra) and Surat and Junagarh (Gujarat) — and four in the South Zone, namely Dharwad (Karnataka), Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu) and Guntur and Nandyal (Andhra Pradesh).

The fact that the same set of trials will now have to be conducted in the eight identified northern locations means that farmers in region would have to wait for yet another year to actually plant the Bt cotton, genetically engineered to confer `in-built' resistance to the dreaded American bollworm insect pest.

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