The Hindu Business Line : Pesticides sector calls for crackdown on fakes

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Pesticides sector calls for crackdown on fakes — Demands amendments in Insecticides Act

Harish Damodaran

The counterfeit business has mainly affected multinationals, which mostly market low volume, high value insecticides.

New Delhi , March 29

THE Rs 3,500-crore organised pesticides industry is demanding that the manufacture and sale of spurious pesticides be declared a cognisable and non-bailable offence, as in the case of drugs.

Currently, out of the industry's total `legitimate' turnover of Rs 3,500 crore, exports contribute roughly Rs 1,100 crore and the remaining Rs 2,400 crore comprises domestic sales.

There are no authentic estimates of the size of the spurious pesticides market, but a broad industry guesstimate puts it in the region of Rs 500-600 crore.

"Just as the Drugs & Cosmetics (Amendment) Bill, 2003, introduced in the last winter session, has proposed the death penalty for spurious drug manufacturers and made offences under the Act cognisable and non-bailable (as against being non-cognisable and bailable now), we want similar amendments in the Insecticides Act, 1968," an industry spokesperson said.

According to him, the country's main markets for the sale of spurious pesticides are Andhra Pradesh (for cotton, chillies and paddy), Gujarat (cotton and groundnut), Maharashtra (cotton and grapes), Punjab and Haryana (cotton, paddy and wheat), Uttar Pradesh (paddy, wheat and horticulture crops) and Rajasthan (cotton). In fact, cotton and paddy (rice) alone account for about 67 per cent of the country's total pesticides consumption.

While the sale of spurious pesticides takes place in virtually all major consuming regions, the manufacturing hub is, however, said to be concentrated in a few centres such as Guntur and Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, Ghaziabad, Hapur, Meerut and Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh and Sonepat, Fatehabad and Bahadurgarh in Haryana.

"Normally, the sales do not take place in the areas where they are manufactured. For instance, the spurious pesticides manufactured in Ghaziabad is first brought to Indira Market in Delhi, just as the consignment from Guntur goes to the nearby Patnam Bazaar, from where it gets marketed all over the country.''

"The sheer distance between the centres of production and consumption and the well-organised network of distribution makes it very difficult to bust the trade," the spokesperson admitted.

Industry observers say that the counterfeit business has mainly affected multinationals, which mostly market low volume, high value insecticides. Take `Tracer', a new generation cotton bio-insecticide incorporating Spinosad, which is a proprietary molecule of Dow AgroSciences LLC, US and marketed here by its 74 per cent subsidiary, De-Nocil Crop Protection Pvt Ltd.

`Tracer' currently sells for about Rs 10,000 per litre, whereas the counterfeit product bearing the same brand and with similar packaging as the original is available for as less as Rs 500 per litre.

"The farmer actually is required to use only 75 ml of Tracer per acre, which costs him Rs 1,100. But the spurious producer makes available a full litre for just Rs 500 and he sprays the entire quantity he does for the older generation pesticides," Mr Rakesh Chitkara, Business Leader (Marketing), De-Nocil, said.

However, it is not just a low-dosage pesticide like `Tracer' that is being spuriously marketed. De-Nocil claims that there are counterfeit versions of even its old-generation products such as `Dursban' (incorporating chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate multi-purpose insecticide), `Monocil' (monocrotophos) and `Karathane' (whose technical material is dinocap, used as a fungicide for mango).

"Even though these are generic pesticides, their high brand value makes them prone to counterfeiting, as there are huge margins and perceived low risks in this business," Mr Chitkara said.

Similarly, Monsanto, too, claims that there are fakes of its `Leader' (containing a new-generation wheat herbicide, sulfosulfuron) and `Machete' (butachlor, which is an old-generation rice weedicide) available in the market.

Counterfeit versions of Syngenta's `Topik' (a wheat herbicide), Bayer's `Confidor' (containing imidacloprid, used against sucking pests in cotton), Indofil Chemicals' `M-45' (a vegetable fungicide) and Rallis India's `Asataf' (an organophosphate insecticide) were also recently seized on the premises of one Mr R.P. Singh, a Ghaziabad-based alleged spurious pesticides maker.

Mr Singh, who was in jail till last week, is now out on bail!

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