India needs to grow more food for its burgeoning population, and green revolution technologies may not be sufficient to meet the demand. Green revolution is fatigued, and India needs second green revolution or an evergreen revolution, and such technological miracles are only possible with advances in modern science and technology.

GM crops technology is the next best available option to prevent crop losses due to pests, diseases, and drought in an environmentally friendly way. Another need of the hour is to prevent post-harvest losses using best possible technologies. Using more and more inputs for food production in ever shrinking agricultural land will be the biggest challenge. That challenge can only be met by modern science and technology. GM crops technology have become much more powerful with the advent of genomics and proteomics, where in all sorts of powerful combinations of biological tools will be available to improve crop productivity.

Synthetic biology, nano-biotechnology and bioinformatics, all are transformative technologies that need to be exploited to improve nation’s farming.
The idea that Indian agriculture does not need modern science and technology, as some people argue, is a recipe for disaster. Just think of information technology that has completely turned the whole world into a global village.

Such technologies must not be discarded or delayed for ideological reasons or romantic notions. Some who are opposed to modern biotechnology abhor commercialization of biological sciences, but don’t mind commercialization of all other sciences from which they all derive day to day benefits.

So what if biology has been turned into a commercial technology. This is 21st century and the world has become a knowledge based economy, and that is how one can sustain the burgeoning population in the world. Just creating knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a waste. Knowledge must be deployed for the benefit of the society. GM technology is scale neutral and all farmers’ rich and poor alike will benefit from it.

GM crops technology has been in existence since 1996 and has been adopted by 25 countries of the world to almost 1 billion acres. In US alone, more than 300 million people consume GM foods daily, and there has not been a single instance of fatality or harm.

This is the world’s largest human feeding trial that is ongoing. GM foods have been evaluated for safety and adverse environmental impacts by some of the leading scientific and regulatory organizations in the world. There should really be no hesitation on India’s part to adopt the technology products when it has a robust regulatory system to assure public safety.

This endless debate about the safety of GM foods must end, and that may happen when an independent regulatory authority like the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) is established expeditiously.

There are some voices that will keep on harping, no matter how much evidence is thrown in support of GM food’s safety, and such people will never be satisfied. Time has come to send a strong message to the Indian public that the nation is on a war path to increase its agricultural productivity, and will not balk at commandeering the might of all science and technology that it can muster.

The Indian scientific community must speak directly to the people of India and assure them of the risks and benefits of modern technologies and help India tackle the food security crisis.

The author is Executive Director, Association of Biotech Led Enterprises – Special Interest Group on Agri-Biotechnology (ABLE – SIGAB). Author can be reached at shanthu.shantharam@ableindia.org

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