“INDO-US KNOWLEDGE INITIATIVE

ON AGRICULTURE –
WHITHER INDIAN FARMER?”

National Workshop on
December 8th & 9th, 2006
Hyderabad

Organised by:

Centre for Sustainable Agriculture &

Centre for World Solidarity

1
 FOREWORD

A lot of debate is raging on in India regarding a bilateral deal between the United States
of America and India related to nuclear energy for civilian purposes. Stakes are so high
that political parties are talking about and preparing themselves for mid-term elections.
This deal had been announced in July 2005 when the Indian Prime Minister was visiting
the USA.

What is interesting to note is that another deal that the two countries got into during the
same visit by the Indian PM, called the “US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agricultural
Education, Research, Service and Commercial Linkages” – and popularly known as the
KIA or AKI (Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture or Agricultural Knowledge Initiative) –
hardly gets a mention in any debates. This deal seems to have bypassed the attention of
political leaders and media analysts even though it seems to have the potential to impact
millions of poor producers in India more directly than the nuclear deal.

This booklet contains (1) an open letter written to the Prime Minister of India, highlighting
the various concerns related to the KIA, endorsed by prominent farmers’ leaders,
environmental and social activists and agriculture scientists, amongst others; and (2) the
proceedings of a national workshop organized in Hyderabad in December 2006 by Centre
for World Solidarity, Centre for Sustainable Agriculture and ‘Knowledge in Civil Society’
forum called “Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture – Whither Indian
Farmer?”.

While the first Green Revolution in India, supported by American aid agencies and
commercial interests went largely unquestioned by civil society groups, the same story
cannot be repeated with the second green revolution that the agriculture establishment is
talking about. The ecological, economic and socio-political implications are fairly predictable
and tilted against Indian farmers and their interests.

This booklet is a small attempt by Centre for Sustainable Agriculture to present the concerns
of well-thinking individuals and institutions who wish to protect the interests of Indian
farmers and their resources, in the form of the proceedings of the national workshop and
the subsequent Open Letter to the Prime Minister. Presentations made by the speakers in
the workshop and the papers submitted by them can be obtained by contacting CSA.
More official information on the KIA can be obtained from the website of DARE (Department
of Agricultural Research & Education, Government of India at www.dare.nic.in).

Hyderabad, September 2007

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 CONTENTS

Open letter to Prime Minister, September 2007 1

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL WORKSHOP 2

Introductory Session 3
Overview of the KIA 4
Need for and Implications of the KIA, drawing lessons from Green Revolution 5
“Similarities & Differences between Indian and American Agriculture: Need for the KIA”. 6
“The Green Revolution & its aftermath: Indian agriculture at cross-roads” 7
“Green Revolution [GR]: Lessons for any future GR from a Science Studies perspective” 8
HRD & Institutional Capacity Building (Agricultural Research & Education) 9
“Agricultural Research & Education in India – Need for a revamp” 10
“Agriculture Research in India – Farmers’ Needs & Knowledge” 11
“Innovative Indo-US Collaborations: Missed Opportunities” 12
Emerging Technologies, Including Transgenic Agriculture 13
“Transgenic Agriculture – experience so far in India & implications on Indian farmers” 14
“Emerging Technologies and IPR Implications” 15
Food Processing, Byproduct Utilisation & Biofuels 16
“Biofuels Vs Food: KIA Proposals and Implications for Indian farmers” 17
“Implications of KIA proposals on farmers in the sphere of Marketing” 18
Water Management 19
“The proposals on Water Management in KIA, need & implications and progress so far” 20
“Drought Proofing & Indian Agriculture – Relevance and Implications of the KIA” 21
Way Forward
ANNEXURES: Workshop Programme, Participants & Introduction to Chairs & Speakers

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To
September 20, 2007
Dr Manmohan Singh,
Hon’ble Prime Minister,
Government of India.

Dear Sir,

Sub: Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agricultural Education, Research, Services and

Commercial Linkages – Demand for an immediate hold on implementation

Respected Sir, this letter is being written to you after looking at the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative
on Agricultural Education, Research, Services & Commercial Linkages (being referred to as the
KIA or AKI) in close detail, after extensive discussions held amongst agriculture scientists, farmers’
leaders, civil society representatives, science policy experts and others on the implications of KIA
on Indian farmers, especially small and marginal farmers. Through this letter, we would like to
convey our deep concerns related to this bilateral deal that you had signed with the US President.

The current agrarian crisis and farmers’ livelihoods:

The KIA hardly makes a mention of the deep agrarian crisis present all over rural India today. In
fact, there is very little mention of farmers in the KIA proposals. Where the current problems in
Indian agriculture are mentioned, they are described as “exciting challenges and opportunities” –
we wonder for whom? How can a high-profile bilateral agreement coming at a juncture of such
a crisis ignore the crisis and fundamental ways of addressing it?

The agrarian crisis in India is to be seen as a livelihoods crisis – the government has to answer
why agri-business corporations are not in a crisis while farmers are attempting to commit suicides
in thousands, if it is truly a farming crisis? The agri-industry is in fact posting growth figures that
are impressive.

Increased production and productivity from farmers will not come if the State takes away their
very dignity, their resources, their interest in their occupation, erodes all support systems and
leaves them only with heavy debt burdens. Productivity cannot just be a factor of a miracle
technology that someone introduces but a factor that is closely related to farmers’ self-worth,
dignity and morale.

The Indian economy (which is seen as the only domain of development) is appearing to declare
its independence from Indian farming and the distress of farmers because the contribution of
agriculture to the GDP is going down and your government measures development only in economic
growth and GDP terms. We need to get out of this framework to understand farming better and
the sustenance it provides to millions of lives.

What farmers need is income security, especially given that the liberalized trade policies that
subsequent governments have pursued have pushed them into unfair disadvantage from all
sides, even as technologies promoted by the NARS and agri-corporations are unsustainable.

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Our analysis also shows that the KIA proposals are certainly not in tandem with other dominant
policy discourse related to agriculture in India now, be it the Planning Commission’s approach
paper to the 11th Plan or the draft Kisan Policy drafted by the National Commission on Farmers
[NCF]. The Planning Commission and the NCF have at least run a semblance of consultative
processes while drawing up their recommendations and while adopting a particular discourse.
The KIA, however, is at contrast to these other policy articulations.

It is apparent that the National Agricultural Research System [NARS] had never done any deep-
thinking workshops institutionally about its role in the entire crisis being experienced by farmers
today and about unsustainable and unsuitable technologies foisted upon farmers. Since no such
analysis exists, the crisis does not inform decisions on any front, including the Indo-US Knowledge
Initiative.

India’s Green Revolution & the ‘Second Green Revolution’:

Numerous studies and papers have brought out the ecological, socio-cultural and other fall-outs
from the Green Revolution. The Planning Commission chose to portray the repercussions in
terms of ‘technology fatigue’ and the ‘ecological disaster’. While the Green Revolution at least
had a stated thrust on improving national food security (that concept of food security is questioned
by numerous experts now) and ran on a principle of social contract, it seems that the Second
Green Revolution is meant only for agri-corporations.

Before making plans for a Second Green Revolution, the country should have first drawn up a
comprehensive balance sheet on the first Green Revolution. Learnings should have been picked
up from such an analysis and critique of the earlier Green Revolution. Such learnings should have
been internalized and incorporated into all your pronouncements on the second Green Revolution
and into the KIA.

Our analysis says that while the country might have obtained self reliance on the food front (that
too based on two grains which don’t assure nutrition security and are known to have caused
other adverse impacts), Green Revolution has completely eroded farmers’ self-reliance. Farmers’
natural resource base has been degraded almost irrevocably. Our bio-diversity has been eroded
irreversibly along with farmers’ knowledge about management, creation and conservation of
such resources. While food security is touted to have been achieved, quality of food in terms of
safety and nutrition has been badly affected. A diverse variety of foods that used to be accessible
and affordable have been lost to the millions of poor in the country. Bio-mass has disappeared on
a large scale and organic cycles of crop-livestock-tree-living soil resources have been broken
through reductionist science. Local economies have only pumped out their wealth with very little
coming back into the villages. In recent decades, any public support system that used to exist for
even that kind of intensive agriculture that GR ushered in, is being systematically dismantled,
leaving farmers to the mercy of greedy markets of agri-corporations.

We find that the agri-research establishment has been indoctrinated into thinking that “There Is
No Alternative” (TINA) to intensive farming using ever-increasing quantities and varieties of
external inputs. This TINA syndrome runs deep in the entire NARS to the extent that they cannot
even start looking at ecological alternatives with any amount of objectivity or scientificity. The
Green Revolution did not happen overnight on the strength of the science behind it but because
of massive public investments in creating huge support systems to address pre-production,
production and post-production issues. Ecological agriculture however has received no such
support in the country and without such public investments going into this paradigm, will not start
appealing to our scientists either. When the GR began, no one wondered about where we will get
the tonnes of chemical fertilizers/pesticides and HYV seeds that were to drive the GR – the
country just set about arranging these through a variety of policy and public investment measures.
However, whenever there is a discussion on alternative paradigms, the first question that is
asked preposterously is, where will we find so much of organic inputs?

Now, with the Second Green Revolution that you are shaping, there is a formal institutionalization
of American corporate interests driving our research agendas and public policy frameworks. This
will further indoctrinate the NARS and other systems into the industrial/intensive model of
agriculture. You have chosen to give the Monsantos of the US, documented earlier for their anti-
farmer policies and known for their lawlessness, a formal place to guide the future of Indian
agriculture as suits them, through the KIA. Why did your government not think of placing some
key farmers’ organizations and other civil society representatives in the country on the Board on
this side?

The Second Green Revolution in the form of the KIA has no mention of farmers, leave alone
farming livelihoods or national food security. Who then is this Second Green Revolution for, at the
expense of public funds, we wonder.

Finally, why do your government and the NARS shy away from understanding, supporting and
promoting an ecological agriculture paradigm – can your scientists compete with some of the
best natural and organic farmers in this country on a variety of parameters related to production,
productivity, economic viability, sustainability, social benefits and so on, before promoting any
other paradigms [given that we have already seen the results of your paradigms]?

India & the USA:

The socio-economic and agro-ecological situations with regard to Indian and American farming
are vastly different. In their model of agriculture, less than 2% of the American population
depends on farming whereas in India, around 65% of our population continue to depend on
farming and allied activities for their very survival.

In India, agriculture is a way of life connected closely with knowledge evolved over centuries of
experiential learning from Nature, connected deeply with the culture of our peoples and their
livelihoods. On the other hand, in the USA, agriculture is an industry, driven mostly by big agri-
business corporations. Even though they claim that it is an efficient model of agriculture to be
emulated here in India to attain higher productivity levels and so on, it is a farming model that is
constantly propped up by ever-increasing amounts of subsidies. The true efficiency of that model
will be clear only when the subsidies are removed. On the other hand, Indian farmers, with very
little support from the government and in the face of highly adverse conditions created by the
government, have proven that theirs is a more efficient system of farming by feeding millions of
Indians and also showing steady increases in production and productivity.

Also important is the fact that the USA has not signed the Convention on Biological
Diversity [CBD] or the Kyoto Protocol or the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. What
is interesting to note is that the main themes of these protocols to which India
subscribes to through ratification and which USA discounts or fights in the international
arena – biological resources including biodiversity, climate change and safety with
regard to living modified organisms - are also key parts of the KIA.

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These protocols enshrine some principles – for instance, biological resources are
sovereign resources of nation-states (CBD), climate change is a big threat to the
planet and immediate interventions are needed to reverse it and stop it (Kyoto) and
living modified organisms need careful impact assessment and handling and prior
informed consent for transboundary movement (Cartagena) which are not respected
at all in the KIA or by the USA. Why is India partnering the USA in such an agreement
then?

The USA, to this day, has not allocated any resources for the KIA whereas India is paying the USA
for unneeded and hazardous technologies from the taxpayers’ money. Ironically, the deal is all
set to ultimately benefit American corporations than Indian farmers. Is this kind of unequal
partnership what one could call as a bilateral agreement?

Why did you not think of having such a bilateral agreement with Cuba, which has shown the
world how to produce more through organic methods even with economic sanctions imposed
upon it – is there any reason why India should not learn from such a model of agriculture, to drive
its next Revolution in agriculture?

On many of the themes included in the KIA where Indians are supposed to learn from the USA,
there is no dearth of knowledge, skills and capabilities within the country. It is not clear why we
need to learn from the USA on water management, drought proofing, food processing etc., when
some of the best models on these themes are right here in the country within the people’s
knowledge domain. While the agriculture research model pursued by the country constantly
erodes such rich knowledge right here, you would like to learn from distant USA at a charge, that
too technologies that do not suit our needs nor address the present agrarian crisis!

The Americans are clearly proposing through the KIA, and in Board Meetings after Board Meetings,
that they would like to use the bilateral deal to make changes in our regulatory regimes related
to IPRs or particular technologies like Genetic Engineering. These changes are to suit their interests
and not to ensure the basic rights of Indian farmers and consumers. In return, what are you
planning to suggest as changes at their end through this bilateral deal? Can you bring down the
huge subsidies that American farming is propped up with, to protect Indian farmers’ interests
from your side?

Coming to the comparative picture between India and USA again, the Indian IPR regime related
to agriculture is very different from the American regime. Whose regime will be applied in this
collaborative research? Who will have patents and what will be the implications for Indian farmers
and their apriori rights on many resources and technologies?

In the USA, patents are possible on everything from a plant to a gene. As you know, all the
notorious cases of bio-piracy from this country involved American scientists and corporations.
What guarantees are you providing to the citizens of this country that the collective heritage of
this country in the form of its biological resources and knowledge will be protected and given
legitimately back to the communities without American bio-piracy now acquiring a legitimate
passage you gave them?

The Biological Diversity Act of India, flowing out of the CBD, requires that permission be obtained
from the National Biodiversity Authority before any biological resource is accessed by any foreigner.
The KIA is not fulfilling any such obligations (Annexure 1). From all accounts, not even Material
Transfer Agreements are in place while valuable genetic resources are already being taken to
the US laboratories by Indian public sector scientists visiting the USA under exchange programmes
or fellowships and so on under the KIA.

India’s Science & Technology and Development framework:

Our development framework focuses only on national economic growth rates and forgets the
livelihoods of millions of Indians eking out a living through farming. As a polity, we seem to be
feeding the endless lifestyle aspirations of millions of urban, middle class Indians who only want
to emulate the Americans and others. This is obviously extremely destructive in an ecological
sense – the ecological foot print that we would be leaving as a country would be far higher than
the developed countries’, if this development model is pursued mindlessly.

At another level, the S & T framework adopted in the case of agriculture was always one that
sought to gain control over nature, rather than working in cooperation with/tandem with nature.
The latter, as thousands of years of Indian farming has shown, is the one that ensures sustainable
resource use – it took only 4 to 5 decades of intensive farming to erode and degrade our resources
to the present situation whereas our forefathers did farming for thousands of years without
leaving the future generations gasping for life.

The S & T framework governing Indian agriculture has been one that requires intensive use of
external inputs which has its own ecological, economic and political ramifications. Commodification
of all inputs has only meant that local economies got drained to fill the coffers of agri-business
companies whose sole aim is to seek more and more markets for their products.

Our S & T frameworks should have been reviewed as a response to the farming crisis all around.
This did not happen; through the KIA we want to further accelerate adoption of the same S & T
approaches in agriculture as in the case of Green Revolution. Those approaches have already
been proven as unsustainable and destructive of our natural resources.

This is in fact a destruction of democracy itself. Electoral democracy, as you are aware, is only a
narrow understanding of democracy. Participation, public debate, accountability, referendum &
recall systems are glaringly absent in our democracy in the context of agriculture. We actually
need a Constitution that respects plurality of knowledges, not just what passes off officially as
“Science & Technology”. We need a Constitution that is ecologically embedded. We need a
Directive Principle of State policy that orders protection of Indian agriculture and the diversity
that exists there.

S & T policy makers sitting in the Ministry of Science & Technology or Department of Agriculture
Research & Education or in the Planning Commission have not learnt anything from other countries
about incorporating alternative paradigms and knowledge systems into the making of an S & T
policy. There is ample positive experience to learn from, elsewhere.

National Agricultural Research System [NARS] in India and its orientation:

The NARS is supposed to have been designed along the Land Grant College system in the USA.
However, the accountability mechanisms that are apparent in the Land Grant system there are
completely missing here. It is a top-down model of institution building that has gone into our
NARS, with no accountability at all towards the clientele – the predominantly poor, small and
marginal farmers of this country.

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The scientific orientation of the NARS is reductionist, piece-meal and fragmented – agriculture
being a complex process of synergies and interactions amongst various factors, such a reductionist
approach will not solve the real life problems of the farmers. This has been proven again and
again – the scientific experiments and their results in a controlled setting in the agriculture
research stations are not replicable in real life conditions of farmers.

There should be an inter-disciplinary, dialectical and holistic scientific approach that should be
adopted by agriculture scientists. Such an inter-disciplinary approach should encompass other
scientific spheres like anthropology, sociology, political science etc. in addition to different
specializations within agriculture science. Synergies between crop-livestock and crop-tree
husbandry have been completely ignored by the agri-research system, for instance. The sociological
ramifications of a particular technology on different kinds of farmers in different locations are not
worked out before large scale promotion of a technology. Another example of the narrow
orientation of the agri-research establishment is the neglect that dryland farming suffers in the
country today.

Even the research agenda of the NARS is not driven by the real life conditions of the farmers. It
is a top-down, linear, lab-to-land model that is adopted in almost all research projects. There is
no participation apparent from the side of the farmers in individual research projects, leave
alone whole institutions and their overall directions of work.

The NARS do not recognize any other knowledge domain other than what gets classified officially
as “scientific”. It is this blind approach that had resulted in the erosion of precious knowledge and
natural resources amongst farming communities in India. The largest knowledge bank is with the
smallholding farmers of India which consists of knowledge of centuries of experiential learning.
This technological arrogance is also ignoring larger experiences evolving across the country to
sustain farming concurrently with initiatives of farmers, individuals and organizations. Such
ready knowledge is constantly being discounted and actively eroded by the NARS in a variety of
ways. Today NARS suffers more from ‘Innovation fatigue’ than ‘Technology fatigue’.

There is nothing in the KIA that promises any changes in the existing deep-rooted maladies of
the NARS. In fact, the technologies chosen by the KIA will push agriculture scientists farther away
from the fields of farmers, deeper into their laboratories (and laboratories in the USA). Agriculture
research orientation is now going to be shifted from applied and adaptive research to basic and
strategic research, as per the KIA. When it is clear that applied research itself had failed in the
Indian agriculture research establishment, what is the rationale behind moving to basic research?
How will they then translate it to farmers’ real needs and conditions on the ground?

Worse, the agriculture education and extension models are also being re-cast to shift these
services away from farmers.

Historically, there has been an excessive orientation of these NARS institutions to gear their
research towards only production and productivity questions rather than looking at farmers’
livelihoods. There are many others, however, in the UN system and elsewhere, who are changing
their S & T institutions, curricula, research design and frameworks and so on to meet the Millenium
Development Goals. Does the Indian NARS have nothing to learn from them, other than learning
from the USA about orienting agriculture research for improving the commercial potential of
agri-corporations?
As mentioned before, the so-called modern technologies in agriculture have only proven to be a
drain on the local economies of farmers rather than improving their livelihoods in a sustainable
manner. It is imperative that any research and extension intervention from the NARS should only
be defined and achieved in a livelihoods context and no other context.

The NARS should realize that in today’s complex world, reductionist techno-centricity will not
solve any problems. The new mandate of the NARS has to be evolved out of the failure of the
earlier mandate and it does not help to continue in the same technological determinism framework.
That is the key cornerstone of post-modern agriculture.

It is also important to re-cast completely the reward and incentive system that drives the agriculture
scientists today. It is not publication of papers or number of patents that should be the driving
parameters of assessing the fulfillment of the mandate of NARS. It is possible for knowledge
flows to occur in a manner that farmers derive benefits, without going through the formal,
expensive, discriminatory and exclusive intellectual property regime – this has been the experience
of civil society work time and again. Agriculture scientists’ reward system should be linked to the
quality and effective time spent with farming communities in drawing the research agenda from
the farmers, by developing technologies in a participatory manner and by using an interdisciplinary
and “expert & non-expert co-inquiry” approach.

At present, the NARS is only turning itself into an outsourcing agency for private corporations.
Private corporations want to use the public sector institutions for their own research needs and
profit-seeking mandates with the lure of some money put into PPP research collaborations and
the agriculture research establishment is ready to forget the needs of their primary clientele.
The foundations for this are already laid out in the form a parallel initiative ‘National Agriculture
Innovation Project’ supported by the World Bank.

Specific KIA proposals:

· Re-orienting Indian agriculture research to basic and strategic research will mean further
cutting off of farmers from these institutions, when the current farming crisis calls for the
reverse – of all public sector institutions related to agriculture having to move closer to
farmers and work along with them.
· Transgenic agriculture has been given a prominent place in the whole deal, under the theme
of Emerging Technologies. It is not clear how this decision has been taken since the debate
is unresolved about the very need for such technologies and the various implications from
the deployment of such technologies in farming. What is the basis for decisions related to
transgenics by the government, given the ever-emerging evidence on the lack of predictability
and scientificity in this technology and the hazards that the technology poses? There is no
evidence that GM crops increase productivity of crops or can withstand climate change vagaries
(In fact, there is USDA data that shows that GM crops might actually mean lowered yields
compared to their non-GM counterparts – if the USA is teaching us through the KIA, it is
hoped that they are teaching us such facts too). There is clear evidence that such crops are
stress-intolerant which means that our national food security itself could be jeopardized by
adopting such technologies in the era of climate change.
· Transgenics by the public sector, without MNC presence, is being projected as being farmer-
friendly reducing the whole discussion to pricing and IPRs. The reality however is that there
are very few farmers who actually demand for and are able to access such public-sector
bred seeds in crops like cotton. Further, experience in collaborative research from the University
of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwar and CICR, Nagpur shows that our IPR literacy is very poor

13
 and we more or less get cheated during the R & D process in these collaborative projects
involving proprietary technologies. Patents and royalties are brought into the picture preventing
the institution from actually releasing seeds to farmers. What lessons are we learning from
such experiences?
· When it comes to proposals related to food processing technologies, they all seem to favour
American capital investments more than the needs of Indian farmers or consumers. Such
technologies have to be assessed for their employment potential to begin with, since the
food processing sector is being projected as the one that will absorb rural population displaced
from agriculture.
· There is also clear evidence of using the KIA for the entry of big (food) retail chains into
India, at the front-end too. It is very unclear what share of the retail price will actually reach
the farmers of the country.
· The government has to decide whether we as a country should focus on food security and
sovereignty of the nation or food processing and value addition meant for export markets.
The KIA certainly gives importance to the latter but is that what the country needs?
· On themes like bio-fuels too, there is an urgent need for careful thinking regarding alternate
use scenarios for precious resources like land and biomass. The KIA proposals seem to be in
contradiction to the dominant discourse with regard to bio-fuels in this country – so far, we
have talked about bio-diesels on wastelands in this country. The KIA talks about ethanol-
based bio-fuels. The KIA has no mention about such technologies which will assist in backyard
production of bio-diesels for community level energy needs by integrating native, hardy bio-
diesel crop species into farming, through cooperative institutional structures. The KIA proposals
are meant to create technologies that will essentially result in a competition between urban
(fuel) and rural (food) needs.
· The KIA has water management as one of its themes of collaboration. India, which is famous
for being a ‘hydrological society’ and for the organic socio-cultural links between communities
and water resources, would have nothing to learn from a country like the USA on water
management and drought-proofing. There is ample experience within this country for the
NARS to learn from. No amount of techno-centric solutions will take care of water resources
– their conservation or preserving the quality. No remediation of contaminated waters can
take place through the NARS especially given the impunity with which contamination from
industrial effluents takes place. Only a radically different view and value system associated
with water as a basic resource of life will change things.
· As mentioned earlier, the IPR regimes in India and the USA are vastly different and this is an
area of great concern with relation to the KIA. Precious germplasm is already moving out of
the country in the name of collaborative research and it is not clear what IPR arrangements
are in place. There do not seem to be any material transfer agreements in place either. We
seem to be legitimizing bio-piracy as never before. On the other hand, communities who are
original contributors to our germplasm collections in various NARS centres are being denied
access to what is legitimately theirs!

The process of formulating the KIA:

This deal has been projected by you as the harbinger of the Second Green Revolution, which
means that it has great significance attached to it. Yet, you chose not to debate it with our elected
representatives or with state governments. From all accounts, it did not even get discussed
properly within the NARS. This is completely unacceptable.
Further, it is not clear what accountability mechanisms exist in the case of KIA – what reviews,
what monitoring, who will be accountable and how. What needs to be done in case an American
party needs to be made liable for a particular project, for instance?

OUR DEMANDS:

We invite you to reverse the possibilities with the KIA by rescuing America from itself, its farming
and its agri-corporations. Please get into a bilateral deal that teaches Americans alternative
paradigms in agriculture and rescues America from the ‘monoculture of mind’ that has evolved
there. We want you to understand and make the Americans understand that democracy is not
just liberty, equality and fraternity but also sustainability, plurality and generosity.

Given that Indian agriculture does not have anything in common with American farming, given
that we have vast amounts of experience, knowledge and capabilities on a variety of subjects
within the country, given that the KIA does not seem to have any benefits for farmers but only
negative implications, given that the Second Green Revolution if any has to be launched in the
country only after due deliberative and democratic processes, given that the IPR implications
from the deal are stacked against Indian interests and given that the current agrarian crisis
facing Indian farmers needs other fundamentally different solutions, we demand that your
government :

· Put the implementation of the KIA on hold immediately. Review the whole deal with credible
agricultural, political and social scientists along with farmers’ union and civil society
representatives, like you are ready to do with the 123 Nuclear Deal, after pressure from
other political parties. Further, debate the agreement within the Parliament and state
Assemblies and discuss it with state governments.
· Draw up a fresh research agenda for the Indian NARS and its different local institutions after
a broad based consultative process with farmers all over the country.
· Provide income security to all farmers in the country by providing them an assured monthly
salary from any special financial mechanism that you evolve for the purpose.
· Allocate all the funds meant for agriculture extension in the hands of the targeted clientele
after organizing the farmers for better accountability.
· Allow immediate access to indigenous germplasm collections to communities who wish to
access such resources for conservation and use, through legislative and administrative means.

Requesting you to intervene in this matter immediately and take all our concerns on board,

Signed & endorsed by:

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Annexure 1

A perusal of the KIA proposal shows that, prima facie, there are violations of the
“Guidelines for International Collaboration Research Projects involving Transfer or
Exchange of Biological Resources or Information” notified on 8th November 2006 by
the Ministry of Environment & Forests under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 [Guidelines
notified under Section 5 (3) (a)].

Specifically,

· The project violates 1 (a) of the notified Guidelines, which specifies that in the
proposal, the collaborative research project should clearly state the Key
Investigator in each of the collaborating institutions who shall be responsible
for all compliances. As pages 20 and 21 of the KIA proposal attached to this
letter illustrate, only tentative list of partners is part of the proposal whereas
the project has been underway from December 2005. Section C.
BIOTECHNOLOGY, of the proposal is of particular relevance and concern
[pp.28-53]. Here, some Indian and American partners are mentioned for the
collaborative research including Mahyco (which under Section 3 (2) of the BD
Act has non-Indian participation) are listed but no mention is made of Key
Investigators of each collaborating institution.

· The project also violates 1 (b) of the notified Guidelines which requires the
proposal to state the ‘details of biological resources occurring in India and
knowledge associated thereto, intended to be transferred and exchanged
under the project, namely the biological name, quantity, purpose, source,
place of collection and such other activities’. No such details are provided in
the attached proposal.

· Guideline 1 (d) also provides for biological resources which have any special
status under any law in force in India or any international agreement and
requires necessary clearances from competent authorities.

23
· It is not clear whether the voucher specimens of the Indian biological resources
exchanged or transferred under the project are being sent to the designated
repository under Section 39 of the Act. It is not even clear whether the
Central Government and the NBA have designated all the repositories for
resources being exchanged/transferred under the KIA.

· Point (8) of the Guidelines requires collaborators not to communicate or transfer

research results of collaborative project to any third party in any manner
without entering into an agreement with the National Biodiversity Authority.
However, this is not being done while the communication/ transfer to a third
party is a certainty given that most US institutions listed in the project proposal
of KIA are in collaboration in turn with private corporations in the USA for such
research.

· It is not clear whether a copy of the approval along with all relevant details
has been sent to the National Biodiversity Authority as required by (14) of the
notified Guidelines.
 Proceedings Report of the
National Workshop on
“Indo-US KIA: Whither Indian
Farmer?”

25
“INDO-US KNOWLEDGE INITIATIVE ON AGRICULTURE –
WHITHER INDIAN FARMER?”
A two-day national workshop was organized by Centre for Sustainable Agriculture & Centre for
World Solidarity on “Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture – Whither Indian Farmer?” on
December 8th and 9th, 2006 in Hyderabad. This workshop was attended by participants from
around twelve states of the country representing a variety of institutions and areas of specializations/
work.

Introductory Session

Dr Uma Shankari, noted sociologist and water resources expert,

welcomed all the participants and introduced them to the workshop. The
following were the main points that she made:

• This workshop is important not just for farmers who constitute

65-70% of India’s population, but all consumers too – is there
anyone who does not consume food? The implications of KIA
with relation to food are going to touch all of us and therefore,
it is important to discuss them and understand them.

• KIA, which appears to be an important collaboration that could

give a different direction to agriculture and agricultural education
in India, has hardly received any attention in public debates. While the Indo-US nuclear
deal at least resulted in some public debate, on KIA, there have hardly been any
discussions. This workshop hopes to kick off some public debate on this important issue.

• More than the money involved in the KIA, other issues about how and why it was brought
in, its implementation, its potential impacts etc., are of serious concern. Is this going to
be one more Enron where despite civil society warnings, governments rush in blindly
only to learn expensive mistakes at great cost?

• Even if we accept for a moment that a joint collaboration between India and US is
needed on the agriculture front, we need to look at what are the critical areas for
collaboration and how it is going to work out to our advantage.

• Civil society has a right to ask questions about this deal – while industry leaders were
consulted by the Planning Commission on this collaboration, not even for politeness’
sake were farmers and their leaders consulted. The workshop also hopes to ensure
some transparency in the agricultural research establishment in the country.

• The whole workshop is expected to pose questions to the government and to the agricultural
establishment about what the real challenges in agricultural sector in India today are
and how they would be addressed through this initiative. How will core issues like the
mismatch between rising costs of cultivation and market prices for farmers’ produce be
addressed, for instance?

27
 Overview of the KIA

Ms Kavitha Kuruganti of Centre for Sustainable Agriculture

then presented an overview of the KIA. Some of the important points
that she made were:

• The KIA’s official name is US-India Knowledge Initiative on

Agricultural Education, Research, Service & Commercial
Linkages. Though it is supposed to bring in the second green
revolution, there is an explicit focus on commercial linkages
which has to be noted.

• The bilateral deal has to be understood in all details to look at all the potential implications
flowing out of it. It is important to do so since it is explicitly talking about a second green
revolution, unlike many other bilateral and multilateral projects that are working on specific
agriculture (research)-related aspects. This is also an agreement penned at the highest
level, with the Indian Prime Minister and the American President pledging their support to it.
This itself has implications in terms of commitment and political will. So far, Green Revolution
was only discussed and analyzed in a post-facto manner. Many of us in the civil society were
either not active on agriculture while Green revolution was itself was unfolding, or the civil
society was not focusing on the possible negative impacts green revolution. After understanding
the implications of the first Green Revolution, we cannot let the second Green Revolution
come in without a critical analysis of its need and implications.

• This is also an opportunity to open up the agricultural research establishment in the country
to democratic scrutiny. Civil society has mostly left this establishment untouched – while
there is recognition that the agricultural research establishment was causing some damage
to the farming communities and their livelihoods in direct and indirect ways, there has never
been an active confrontation or an effort to democratize the establishment. We have done
our work related to sustainable agriculture more or less bypassing the agricultural research
establishment and ignoring them. However, we need to see critically what the role of the
research establishment is in the current crisis facing Indian agriculture, about democratization
etc.

• The KIA needs to be analysed at four different levels – one, the content of the agreement –
what it is promising to do, the message between the lines, the institutional mechanisms
being put into place including large MNCs on the Board etc.; two, the link between the KIA
and other larger processes unleashed on Indian agriculture (with the KIA describing the
current crisis as an exciting challenge and opportunity); three, the process that is being
adopted to formulate and implement important changes through the KIA and four, what
could be done about the KIA. The KIA makes very little mention of Indian farmers in its
proposal but civil society needs to analyse mostly from the perspective of farmers – what are
the implications for them?

• While the crisis in Indian farming is more or less described in a similar manner by various
policy-makers – the Planning Commission approach paper to the 11th Plan, the NCF’s Kisan
policy draft, the World Bank’s Development Review paper, the KIA proposal etc., the
recommendations are at variance with each other. “Ecological damage” and “technology
fatigue” are acknowledged as much as climate change and irrelevance of current agricultural
 research in the country. While the Kisan policy draft says that ecology, equity and economics
should be foundation of farming here, advocating pro-nature, pro-poor, pro-women and pro-
small farmer technologies, the KIA is saying contrasting things – the KIA in fact forgets to
mention farmers, leave alone pro-poor and pro-women things! Both the draft Kisan policy
draft and the eleventh plan draft approach paper talk about exploiting fully the potential of
existing technologies to improve productivity of Indian agriculture – the KIA however is not
about bridging this ‘knowledge deficit’! While the planning commission paper talks about
strengthening adaptive and applied research, the KIA is about re-orienting Indian agriculture
research to basic and strategic research. What is also interesting to note is that eminent
people like Dr M S Swaminathan, who was responsible for coming up with the draft Kisan
policy and its recommendations is also on the Board of the KIA as an honorary advisor from
the Indian side, with contrasting recommendations and approaches to the problem.

• There are some important decisions that need to be taken given that Indian farming is at
cross-roads – the choices are almost vertically split. Techno-centric Vs. Holistic approaches,
for instance. Export markets Vs. Domestic markets. Centralised, top-down models of agriculture
research and extension Vs. Community upwards agriculture development processes. Control
over nature Vs. cooperation with nature. The crucial question seems to be whether we want
Indian farmers to do the agriculture or are policy makers talking about Indian agriculture
devoid of farmers (a la the USA)?

• The KIA’s influence may not be directly on improving farming in India but would be mostly to
bring about a reform in our policies and legislations. This is a lever that the US and the
American industry in particular, can use, to bring about changes in our regulatory regimes,
the institutional mechanisms of research etc. In May 2006, for instance, the US had used this
bilateral agreement as a lever with which to push its agenda when it approached the WTO
committee on Technical Barriers to Trade [TBT] where it raised objections and questions
regarding India’s GM regulatory regime – it was interesting to note that the questions were
related not just to regulation of imports but about domestic issues too.

• 60% of the total budget of the 350-crore rupees of the KIA is meant for “emerging technologies”
which includes transgenic technology in our agriculture. Compared with the current agri-
research budgets in the country over the past few years, the KIA budget is about 9% of the
plan outlay for agri-research in the country.

• There are four themes broadly covered by the KIA – Agri-research and education (which is
about recasting curriculum, methodologies, tools, research orientation etc.); Agri-Processing
and Marketing (including Food Processing, by-product utilization, bio-fuels etc.); Emerging
Technologies (genomic mapping, molecular breeding, transgenic crops etc., for various crops
including staple crops like rice and wheat); and, Water management (recycling of waste
water, better groundwater utilization, precise forecasting of droughts and better drought
proofing etc.).

• Several issues of serious concern and contention are thrown up by the KIA which need to be
discussed at length and for which the Indian government has to be made accountable - what
similarities exist between India and US that we have to learn from the USA? Have we learnt
any lessons from the Green Revolution? If yes, what are the lessons and how have they been
incorporated into the designing of a second green revolution as the KIA proposes? Will
techno-centric approaches to Indian farming (crisis) have real solutions for farmers, given
the larger reality of liberalized trade, cheaper imports and so on? Will the second green

29
 revolution really provide livelihoods for farmers, help them hold back their lands and continue
farming with dignity? KIA clearly forgets about food security after the preamble, while there
is much said about food processing, value addition, urban consumers, export markets and so
on. By leaving bio-fuel promotion to free market forces, will it become a case of fuel prices
(for the booming middle classes, whose consumption patterns are left unquestioned and
demands only catered to) Vs. food prices (for the poor starving millions in the country)?

• IPRs are a major concern flowing from this bilateral deal. The past experience of Indian
public sector bodies collaborating with private entities and others in the US should teach us
valuable lessons about the implications of such IPRs on our research as well as possible
commercial release of products. UAS-Dharwar for instance faced such a problem with IPRs
earlier. They had tried to develop Bt Cotton varieties from the University, claiming that farmers
need not depend on the expensive Bt Cotton hybrids that were being sold in the brand name
of Bollgard, back in 2002. They started developing such Bt Cotton hybrids by borrowing a
gene from Rockefeller Foundation. Four five years down the line they still have not released
these Bt cotton varieties (whether they should work on and release Bt Cotton varieties is a
pertinent but different question of course). UAS-Dharwad was told that they could not release
their Bt Cotton varieties because Rockefeller Foundation had in turn obtained the gene from
Monsanto and it was proprietary! The agreement happened at Pusa and the gene was given
to UAS Dharwad, the University had not even worked out what the actual IPR implications in
the agreement are and just plunged into their research work. This is what is happening with
Bt Brinjal again. UAS Dharwad under ABSP-II project got involved in developing Bt Brinjal
variety and the ex-Vice Chancellor is heard to tell in public meetings that the University is
now being asked to pay fifty lakhs of rupees though they thought it was for free.

• About the process adopted for debating the need for and designing the KIA, much has gone
wrong. There was no Parliamentary debate for something as momentous as launching the
second green revolution in the country. State governments were not involved and NARS
people themselves were not consulted. There was no bottom up approach within the institution
leave alone asking farmers and civil society how a second green revolution should be. For
farmers, it will not longer be just erosion of their knowledge (as has happened during the
Green Revolution) but active confusion created through the market place (technologies
marketed through money power and advertising strategies, ultimately).

• Many other unanswered questions remain too - Is this about India being a testing ground for
several technologies? Is this only about US agribusiness’s opportunities in India? How and
who will this whole deal be accountable to?

• While KIA by itself may not bring about the much hyped Second Green Revolution, it will
certain alter the policy environment in a radical way to suit American business interests. It
will also re-cast the agriculture research establishment in irreversible ways and push it into
a lot of public-private partnerships which may not benefit farmers. This is about favouring
private players, proprietary technologies, big private retail sector etc.

• A few scientists and bureaucrats of ICAR were met and informally interviewed by CSA
representatives on this bilateral deal. These representatives point out that the KIA has been
a very top-down process, without really incorporating lessons from the Green Revolution.
There has not been any consultative process worth its name within the establishment and it
is mostly political expediency that is driving this deal, the interviewees felt.
Therefore, the KIA should be critically analysed and debated for its own potential implications but
also as a step towards democratizing the agricultural research establishment in the country.

SESSION 1: Panel Discussion on

Need for and Implications of the KIA, drawing lessons

from Green Revolution

This session was chaired by Sri M V Sastri, Convenor, Centre for World Solidarity. There were
three speakers on the panel – Sri Devinder Sharma (noted agriculture trade policy analyst), Sri
Bhaskar Save (well known organic and natural farmer from Gujarat) and Dr Shiv Viswanathan
(eminent sociologist and Science, Technology
& Society Studies expert).

Sri M V Sastri made a few opening remarks

from the Chair. He felt that there is a necessary
shift needed to include non-agriculture
scientists into discourses about agricultural
policies. It cannot be left entirely to scientists.
There is a growing realization world over that
inter-disciplinary approaches are needed for
democratizing agriculture research. Further,
there is also a need to include farmers as the
primary stakeholders into such discourses and policy-making processes. For that reason, a debate
on KIA has to draw in a variety of experts and stakeholders.

He further added that even though the farming community in the US is minuscule in terms of
numbers, it has a great say in policy-making. They can still change the complexion of the American
Congress if their interests are adversely affected. In 1890s and early part of last century, American
politics centered around American agriculture. This small sector gets billions of dollars as subsidy.
The American Government is seen to be with farming community. In contrast, here in India, a
hundred thousand farmers have committed suicides despite announcements of package after
package.

“Similarities & Differences between Indian and American

Agriculture and need for the KIA?”.

Sri Devinder Sharma then made his presentation on

“Similarities & Differences between Indian and
American Agriculture and need for the KIA?”.

Congratulating CSA and CWS for taking this initiative to hold a

national workshop on the KIA, Mr Sharma pointed out that the
fact that there has been no debate on this important issue is
also a reflection on the agricultural scientists in the country
(compared to the Indo-US nuclear deal which brought together

31
many nuclear scientists of the country to write to the Prime Minister). The following is a transcription
of most of his talk:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, let me present two scenarios to you. India is seen as the Land of the Holy
Cow. We have all been made to believe that all the 400 species of livestock in India are
unproductive, they hardly give any milk. So what do you do? We have to improve the productivity
of the Indian milk production, we’re told. There are 27 breeds in India – many of them fit
remarkably well in the areas that they belong to. Then an impression was given that these
breeds are good for nothing. So what you must do is to bring the improved germplasm of Jersy
or Holstein Frisian, then cross breed your cows, then they start giving the milk. Why is it that we
never realize our own potential and everybody thinks that our cattle is unproductive? Is there
something wrong here? If you read the Agricultural History written by MS Randhawa, he says
that these breeds are well endowed and respected for their high yielding capacity. We had a
White Revolution in the country but eventually, it is a recent FAO report that finally opened our
eyes. The report says that Brazil has emerged as an important exporter of Indian cattle breeds
and is also into embryo transfer and is selling embryos at a particular price to Asia and Africa.
The report tells us that in the 1960s, Brazil imported four cattle breeds from India. When these
breeds landed in Brazil, they found that these breeds could also yield a lot of milk. They had
actually imported them for their beef potential. Today, Brazil is benefiting from the breeds that
we had badly neglected and discounted. It speaks volumes about the way we did agriculture.

“Twenty years later, Pepsi Cola entered India through the back door by promising a second
horticultural revolution in trouble-torn Punjab. When they entered India, they talked about those
kinds of varieties that would suit the food processing industry. They said that Indian potato and
tomato varieties were not good for food processing. ‘We’ll bring our own germplasm from America
and Venezuela’, they said. Subsequently they brought in 6 varieties of Potato into India and it was
found out by the Central Potato Research Institute that the varieties brought by Pepsi were as
good and as bad as existing Indian varieties. No wonder that Pepsi Cola still uses Indian varieties
of potato for their potato chips. Then came the KFC. When KFC came in, they said that Indian
chicken is not of good quality, so you must bring in improved variety. When Pepsi Cola brought in
potatoes and KFC brought in improved chicken, they must have revolutionized the entire food
processing industry in India. However, they still use Indian breeds of poultry for their foods. When
the companies want to push in something, they always brand our products as inefficient or
substandard or poor in quality. They always say that they would bring superior quality.

“Around 1985, there was an amendment in the American Congress called the Bumpers amendment.
Senator Bumper introduced an amendment which said that the US will no longer support or
provide aid to anything that is in opposition to their trade interests, and that would mean essentially
in case of agriculture. So US in 1980s started withdrawing from all those areas where it was
competing. Let us say when it wants work on rice in Asia, it said we want to withdraw the
investments that we made in India because it competes with American interests. On other products
like Soybean and so on and so forth. This amendment still holds good and changes the course of
the scientific collaborations in the days to come.

“Let’s look at the similarities or dissimilarities that exist between these two countries. In America,
in the previous century, the country actually moved 27 million people out of agriculture. This was
before the War. This was because they had to make way for industry to come in. At the time that
India attained independence, the total population of America involved in agriculture was roughly
around 10%. The average landholding size at that particular point of time was 50 ha. In 2000,
the last time they had their census, they did not even count the number of farmers for the first
time in their history. The number of farmers had come down to such a low level that they didn’t
have to count them. They do have some farmers left. There are fewer people on the American
farms today than the number of people in their jails. What a remarkable development model!
The same model is now being pushed all over the world.

“I think when we talk of this Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture we must look beyond the agreement
at the larger onslaught on agriculture that has been pushed all over the world. Why is it that
America which has less than 2% of farmers and 4% of GDP from agriculture is so interested in
agriculture? I think that is the question that is bothering many of us. Why is 4% in GDP making
them so interested in agriculture, what is happening in the WTO and so on and so forth? University
of Tennessee at Knoxville came out with a study which said that GDP is not the right way to see
the role of agriculture in the economy. With only a 4% share in the GDP, agriculture still accounts
for a 60% share in the America’s economy. That was a quite a revelation. When I shared this bit
of information with agricultural policy makers in India, they were just baffled because even here,
they only talk about share of agriculture to GDP in India is falling and therefore we need not
bother much about agriculture. What we are not understanding is that the share of agriculture in
India’s entire economy is roughly 80-90% and that we don’t want to count.

“Ladies and gentlemen, in America, they forcefully removed people out of agriculture after the
war – however, America’s agricultural exports were increasing, food exports were increasing,
subsidies went on increasing. It was agribusiness corporations that have taken control over the
agriculture there. Here, when we talk about agriculture, we are talking about farmers – every
fourth farmer in the world is an Indian. About 600 million people directly dependent on agriculture.
Average land holding has come down from 4ha in 1947 to 1.3ha now. If you are maintaining a
cow in America, you require 8-10 hectares of land for the kind of feed that goes to the cow
whereas in India, a family of 5 members plus one or two cows would survive on 1.3 hectares of
land.

“The crisis in Indian agriculture today is actually due to the collapse of the Green
Revolution. Scientists call it as ‘(technology) fatigue’ but I call it the collapse. The Green Revolution
model has completely collapsed and let’s accept that. Unless we accept that, we cannot plan
what we need to do to reorient our agriculture on economically viable and sustainable lines. We
need to look back to understand how our understanding of agriculture was changed and how we
shifted our policies towards American agriculture. USAID did a remarkable job when they set up
agricultural universities in India under the Land Grant system. Pantnagar was the first agricultural
University and now we have 47 agricultural universities, all based on the Land Grant system of
education. They knew that if you have to change the agricultural system of a country like India,
you must change the educational system. You must change the mindset of entire generations of
people, the scientific community, and they did it remarkably well. I still remember that when I
was a student of agriculture, the soil science that I used to read was Buck man and Brady. They
did not know about tropical soils but we still read what Buckman and Brady had to tell about our
soils! For everything that they wanted to teach or promote, they made us believe that our agriculture
is substandard, backward and inefficient. In the education system through which we all came out
in agricultural universities, we were made to believe that this is the only way forward. We have
to bring in the so-called improved varieties, add more fertilizers, spray pesticides, pump out
more water and so on if food production and productivity had to be improved. Yes, the Green
revolution came and scientists go on patting themselves for the increase in the food production.

“That is history. Whether we did a remarkably good job or not is debatable. We went on increasing
our production and productivity - NPK was the basic mantra. I always call the agricultural scientists

33
as the NPK breed – a majority of the agronomic research in India in the last 40 years is based on
NPK. Interestingly, you have all these various avenues to research on agronomic research, qualities
of soil, so on and so forth; but every time a PhD student came out it was only on the NPK model.
This tells you a bit about the kind of mindset they had put in. NPK, NPK and NPK – the negative
impact of this is visible now. Some of us see the need for correction. However, the scientific
community, instead of suggesting corrections is coming out with more green revolution as the
answer. If your soil fertility is falling low, you are asked to add more fertilizers, rather than saying
that you need to shift now, that we learnt a lesson that this is not suitable for our sustainable
farming system. We went on doing this kind of mistake for the last 20 years and the result today
is the complete destruction of the natural resource base.

“Some of the agricultural technologists did another job - they pushed in a technology which is not
even suitable for irrigated areas into the un-irrigated areas. I still remember that National Academy
on Agricultural Research Management (NAARM) did a report which said that dry sands are
hungry for chemical fertilizers - what a remarkable report! A faulty model of agriculture was
promoted into all systems of farming in India, not realizing or acknowledging that there could be
an alternative approach. Scientists got disconnected from the realities of farming and that has
been the biggest casuality in our entire understanding of agriculture. We went on promoting all
these faulty technologies even in dryland agriculture even though we knew that these high yielding
varieties require more water, more fertilizers and so on. Similarly, hybrid varieties require roughly
1.2 times more water that high yielding varieties. In the rainfed areas common sense should tell
us that we require varieties which require less water. In the rainfed areas of India we have
actually ended up growing varieties which require double the amount of water. What a remarkable
system! The scientific community has turned a blind eye - you have hybrid rice, hybrid sorghum,
hybrid corn, hybrid cotton, hybrid vegetables…all of them are grown in rainfed areas.

“At a time when Mrs. Gandhi was our Prime Minister in 1983, Ronald Reagan was the President
of America. Ronald Regan made a statement then and I quote – ‘If America cannot find an export
market for its produce, the American economy will collapse with the weight of artificial agricultural
subsidies’. So the world began to think about how to bail out the US and Europe from this crisis
– this was justified in the name of the poor and the underprivileged. We were also ready to bow
our heads in front of such plans. Look at the WTO now. The role of KIA is to be seen in the
context of the WTO also. This is part of the trinity which began with the World Bank and the IMF.
They started telling us that it is no longer good to grow staple foods like wheat and rice and that
wee need to diversify. That happened first in Latin America and in Africa and now of course India
is under great pressure to diversify its agriculture. Indian agricultural scientists are also ready to
say that it is a dire need now. We somehow refuse to see the politics that exist beyond these
policies.

“Let’s take an example of rice - all these years we were told that pesticides are inevitable if you
want to increase food productivity. So we’ve used pesticides on all crops including rice, as though
there was no other alternative. The IRRI has now gone on record saying it was a waste of time
and effort to use pesticides on rice in Asia. The farmers in Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, India
and Bangladesh are getting higher yields of rice without using pesticides. It took four decades for
the scientists to understand that pesticides were not at all required on rice. Here in Andhra
Pradesh, Non Pesticidal Management is being adopted now in a large scale promoted by CWS
and CSA. It is not just rice but all other crops that do not require pesticides – yet, we went on
promoting and promoting pesticides blindly. Now, the damage is evident with these toxic chemicals.
The scientific community has to acknowledge that they were party to the entire episode.
“This is a paradigm where we go on giving farmers technologies that they do not need. It is the
same with genetically modified seeds – we are told that if we don’t give this technology to
farmers, they would suffer. In reality, farmers given this technology are committing suicides.
Growing indebtedness of farmers is not because the farmer drinks or is spending too much
money on marriages and so on….the reality is that we actually brought in technologies that were
not required and were expensive. They upset the entire economy of the farmers. The cost of
production had gone up enormously. People blame money lenders but they forget to mention the
role of nationalized banks in this entire process of actually exacerbating the crisis.

“As a parallel process, while we were destroying our land and other natural resources along with
our farmers, we were shifting agriculture into agricultural business. When the WTO was brought
in, we were told that farmers of developing countries can benefit now by exporting and that we
could import food at low prices. The Punjab Agricultural University, the seat of the GR, actually
did a report on this. The Vice-Chancellor was asked by the Government of India how wonderful
the WTO would be for the farmers in the state, in a report demanded overnight. So he asked the
economics department – by the morning, I want a report from you on what the WTO would do to
Punjab, he said. The report said that it will be wonderful for Punjab….Punjab will export planeloads
of foods, fruits and cut flowers and we will have dollars coming back into Punjab, it was predicted.
That was 1995. Now in 2006, where are all those promised dollars? We ignored the realities of
WTO and tried to bring in a system that actually benefited the corporations. The WTO was a
model which was actually designed to promote the interests of agribusiness corporations. In
1995, the WTO promised that the world will gain $829 billion a year, if the entire trade obstacles
are removed. Out of which, the gain to the developing countries was projected to be $537 billion.
Latest figures would shock you – the total gain from WTO now is estimated to be $34 billion.
From $829 billion, it has come down to $34 billion. The share of the developing countries has
come down from $537 to $6.7 billion and translated into Indian rupees, 35,000 crores is what the
developing countries will gain every year. This is the gain for 110 developing countries of the
world. The rural development ministry’s budget in India is Rs 60,000 crores and we are only
talking about Rs 35,000 crores as the gain from WTO. Of course India’s share is negative in
WTO. What has happened in the entire bargain? Developing counties had to remove all the trade
barriers and country after country became a food importing country. When you import food, you
actually import unemployment. That’s what happened in the developing part of the world. Farmers
of one country have been pitted against small and marginal farmers of another developing country.
The only gainers are America and the European Union. The American gain from the export of
food and agricultural commodities is $10 billion a year. The European Union has increased their
export by 26% which equals to $3 billion a year. We now know who are the gainers and who are
the losers.

“World over, emergence of agribusiness companies and consolidation is getting stronger. There
will be three kinds of players now in the food chain. In America, the technology is produced by
one set of companies – Monsanto, Syngenta and so on. Then another set of players – the food
trading companies like Cargill come in. Monsanto produces the seed and the Cargill will buy the
grain. The third player is the big retailer. With the retail chain super markets, from the seed in
the field to the food on your plate, the entire food chain is very well determined and in the hands
of a few powerful players. In India also, Monsanto will give us food through Reliance. In America,
the home for contract farming and commodity trading, if these systems were so good for farmers
with the elimination of middlemen, why are farmers continuously quitting agriculture? Can someone
answer that soundly before advocating it for other countries like India?

35
“We have been told again and again that for Indian farmers to be competitive in the global
markets, we have to promote technologies like Genetic Engineering to improve productivity. The
paddy productivity in America is 7 t/ha and in India it is 3 t/ha. So if Indian farmers have to
compete globally, they must raise their productivity levels from 3 tons to 7 tons, we’re told.
Incidentally, the people who grow 7 tons per hectare are the not the leading exporters. The
country which is the biggest exporter of rice is Thailand, whose productivity is lower than that of
India at around 2.8 tons per hectare, which means productivity has got nothing to do with global
dominance. With increased productivity, farming would become viable, they argue. Scientists are
misleading farmers on that count too. In America, total output of rice is $1.2 billion. Those
farmers however cannot survive till they get a corresponding subsidy. The total subsidy that
American rice growers get is $1.4 billion. If you remove their subsidy their entire rice production
falls. This is not only true for rice but also for other crops. In India if a farmer gets to raise his
productivity from 3 tons to 7 tons, please tell me who will provide the farmer a corresponding
subsidy? There, it is corporations which are getting subsidy in the name of farmers. It is not
efficiency that makes agriculture viable there but subsidies. The question today in the global
arena is that of subsidy versus subsistence. Unless we realize this, we are not going to address
the real issue of the farming crisis here.

“World over, Bt Cotton has been promoted in the name of productivity and frontier technology, as
in the case of USA and India. In the US, the total output of cotton is $3 billion. The subsidy that
25,000 cotton farmers get is around $4.7 billion. 20,000 cotton farmers in America, get a subsidy
of $15 million a day. These subsidies depress the global prices by about 40%. That means that
the Vidarbha farmer is priced out. The American cotton growers survive not because of their
efficient way of farming but because of the huge subsidies provided to them. Add to this the
complication of IPRs - India is a mega diversity centre as far as the biodiversity is concerned. We
are home to 45,000 species and are home to 81,000 animal species including lower forms of life.
Out of this, 7,000 plant species are endemic and originate from India. On the other hand, only 5
plant species and 3 animal species have originated in America. You cannot build a superpower
with 5 plant species and 3 animal species. So what do you do? You try to appropriate or
misappropriate genetic resources from all over the world. We have been told that genetic resources
are humankind’s heritage. They must be conserved and put in one place, we were told. We did
that. We collected our rice germplasm, we collected our wheat germplasm and we collected our
dryland germplasm and put them in gene banks at different places. Then we were told that this
is mankind’s heritage, so if you keep rice germplasm in Cuttack or in Hyderabad it is not going to
helpful, lets put them in one genebank in international agricultural research centres. So we put
our rice germplasm in International Rice Research Institute, Philippines, wheat germplasm in
CYMMIT, Mexico, and so on. Then they said, to keep your rice germplasm or wheat germplasm
in a city like Mexico City or Manila city, there is always a chance that some terrorist will come
along and blow it up. So what do you do? You must keep a duplicate copy under safe custody. So
where is that safe custody? It is in mountain rocks of Fort Collins in America. So they they put a
gene bank there and the world’s germplasm was collected and kept there. The world was assured
that the world’s resources are now taken care of! In 1992, in the Earth Summit, the Convention
on Biological Diversity was signed. The CBD for the first time said that plant genetic resources are
no longer the heritage of mankind but a national sovereign resource. However, the collections
which were already with USDA are outside that purview. Which means that America has control
over the vast germplasm collections from all over the world. They have the raw material, they
have the biotechnology, they have the money but the problem is that they don’t know what to do
with these plants. After all you can’t go on deciphering and analyzing the composition of each
plant for what is commercially useful there. So what do you do? You go to those communities
who actually live with these species. Those communities have the traditional knowledge that
goes with these traditional resources, as
you all know. No wonder that traditional
knowledge has become the buzz word
now – that it is mankind’s heritage and
that we must document it before it gets
lost and so on. Every scientist, policy
makers, CSIR, ICAR and others became
very kind and started documenting the
traditional knowledge. And the argument
was that only if you have this
documentation can you challenge bio-
piracy. The reality is that we do not even
know what patents are being obtained
where, based on what resources and knowledge stolen from where. However, ready documentation
in a digitized form, in the name of conserving traditional knowledge is being prepared. It is of
course readily available for corporations that so desire. Some how, civil society also fell for it.
We have joined hands and ensured that they not only the plant genetic resources but also the
traditional knowledge. That’s what agri-corporations are looking for and if there are still some
missing links, the Indo-US knowledge initiative will fill that gap.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the farmers are being completely and continuously squeezed and the
agribusiness corporations are continuously increasing their profits. In spite of the so-called
successful implementation of the GR, the WTO and various other things, the average monthly
income of an Indian farming family is Rs. 2115/- as per the NSS estimates. This includes income
from dairying also. The implications of this model of agriculture are clear – we are following a
model that began in Europe and America where farmers were forcibly removed from their farming.
Despite all the subsidies that they get, European farmers are constantly quitting agriculture. It is
now said, no problem if farmers are dying by suicides or quitting agriculture and migrating.
Governments want to facilitate big business to come in whether it is Reliance or Bharti. This is
actually the Exit Policy for farmers in India. We can expect 400 million farmers to leave rural
areas and migrate to urban centres in India by the year 2015. This will be the biggest disaster
that this country has ever witnessed. This displacement will surpass all displacement we have
seen so far from big dams and so on. This KIA is just a part of the bigger design. We should be
clear about where this is all leading, who it will benefit and so on. Agricultural scientists who are
supporting such initiatives should remember that their very livelihoods are at stake too, here.
This initiative might give them some space to travel abroad and may pay some salaries for a
while. They are looking at this as a wonderful opportunity thrown at them when they seem to
have nothing else to do. However, they should understand the larger scheme of things, where
more and more universities are unable to pay and keep their agricultural scientists and educators.

“For us in the civil society, ensuring that the farmer does not disappear from the economic radar
screen of the country is a great challenge. We should see how we can join hands and get support
to ensure that the future of farmers is not as dismal as it appears. Thank you”.

37
 “The Green Revolution & its aftermath:

Indian agriculture at cross-roads”.

This presentation was followed by Sri Bhaskar Save

about “The Green Revolution & its aftermath: Indian
agriculture at cross-roads”. He spoke in hindi, which was
later translated into English by Sri Bharat Mansata, a writer
and publisher.

“About farming, Vinobha Bhave had once said that if there is a

good mix of science and spirituality, there could be prosperity
and development for everyone. But today, we seem to have
left spirituality and non-violence behind us and we are only
hankering after science – in this path, there can only be disaster.
Unfortunately, science and violence are going hand and in hand
and this could end all of us. Knowledge can be of two kinds –
spiritual and scientific. If we have scientific knowledge without values, then are problems. In the
knowledge of the first kind, we assumed that human beings, animals, plants, birds and other
smaller living organisms are all one family. The purpose of science should be to serve all these
living organisms – otherwise, such science is not safe nor is it scientific. Science should be
combined with values of affection, of unity, of cooperation etc. Devoid of such values, science
could only be destruction.

“There is spirituality embedded within farming. Natural farming is made of such values combined
with science. The main purpose is to make very little investments but get higher and healthier
produce. Farming is a cultural creation. From one grain, there are thousands of grains created
and that too, thrice a year! It is a way of life and it is a path that teaches you how to live. It is way
of life that brings happiness and it is not a business, it is a philosophy. By no account should it be
seen as a business enterprise.

“Gandhiji pointed out to four main pillars or principles of such farming. After 1947, after obtaining
independence, our production in the country went down. There was much emphasis being given
on increasing production at any cost. It was Gandhiji who said that the poverty of this country will
not be removed by increasing production. There would be many problems emerging out of this
quest for increasing production, he had pointed out. Nature itself has such ways of increasing
one grain thousand-fold, that too over several seasons each year – if that was the case, where
is the question of us increasing production? If you really want to increase production, you need
more and more people in this country to do farming. In fact, everyone in this country should get
into farming, he said. For more people to do farming, there should be very little capital requirement
in agriculture; very little machinery and equipment for the purpose; very little modern technology.
Our decline in production was mostly due to the Second World War that had ended just before
independence. It will not be chemicals and other technologies that will increase production – it
will be more and more farmers getting into agriculture that would result in increased production.

“We have however adopted such Green Revolution technologies that the farmer needs more and
more capital, more equipment and machinery like tractors, threshers, pumpsets etc. and more
modern scientists (more BSc-Agriculture and MSc Agriculture people around). With all of this,
the cost of cultivation only went up. The margins left for the farmer are only 5-10% of the cost.
The farmer has been reduced to the state of a beggar. The country’s sovereignty depends on its
farming and the agriculture is in turn dependent on farmer. If a country’s farmer has been
reduced to a beggar, the country has been reduced to being a beggar too. In a country where
farmers commit suicide, the country itself would have to commit suicide soon unless it mends its
ways urgently.

“Soil is a living thing – there are millions of organisms in every teaspoonful of soil. Therefore, a
principle of minimum interference is what is needed here including ‘no tilling farming’. We
should not do the cruel thing of applying chemicals on soils. Secondly, it took millions of years for
our earth to cool down, for rains to start and for the soils to form. This should not be undone by
us so easily with such destruction. Thirdly, the right to life of various living forms is the same as
the right of human beings to live on this planet. That’s the reason why farming should not use any
harmful chemicals. Lastly, weeds are a boon for farmers. These should not be destroyed. Instead,
they should only be controlled. It is like letting your hair grow on your head. The moment you go
bald, it will not come back again. We should not allow Mother Earth to go bald either.

“There are also four principles that need to be adopted in farming. One, in this world, there is no
organism that is an enemy to the other. All organisms are friends of others. God is not so foolish
and cruel that he would created enemies for you. Second, nothing that grows on this Mother
Earth is a ‘waste’ that could be pulled out, killed through weedicides and so on. That would only
amount to struggle against Nature. Third, we have rights only on the harvest/fruit and the seed
of what grows in a farm. What comes out is not production but Nature’s creation. That amounts
to a maximum of 15% of what comes up as nature’s creation. The rest is for nature, for the soil
and so on. Therefore, if you don’t allow even a leaf to go out of your farm while farming but only
give it back to nature, you don’t have to bring anything from outside into your farm. For forty
years now, I have done farming without bringing anything from outside. If I don’t bring anything
from outside and nothing goes outside, it means that everything that I produced as fruit and seed
is mine.

“In farming we should look for methods with the least investment while the yields are stable or
even increasing. A farmer should decide whether s/he is looking for produce or profits from
farming first. If it is produce, then you should realize that nature has a way of giving you that
produce – from one grain to thousand grains. In the pursuit of produce, without thinking about
whether you will get anything back at all, if you go on applying chemicals on your land, then you
are showing your distrust and negligence towards nature. Even when I began farming, I was
trying to increase production at any cost. I applied lots of chemicals and my yields increased
indeed. However, I realized that the sustaining the increase in yields was important. In the model
I had adopted, to sustain yields, I had to apply increasing doses of chemical fertilizers, chemical
pesticides, water, weedicides etc. If this is not done, the yields will come down. Our ancestors did
not have to do this.

“When I found that my land was quickly getting spoilt, I took up the four principles I mentioned
earlier – no tillage, no application of weedicides, no other chemicals. I did not do anything. By
that time, my yields had come down by 50% with the intensive practices I had adopted. It was ok
that the yields had halved. With the new natural farming methods that I adopted, my costs
became just 10%. This still left with me with a lot more margins than the earlier method! I did
not believe it fully. I continued to try this on more land in the second year. By itself, the yield went
up. The margins went up too. By the sixth year, the production was higher than where I had
begun. I realized that the production is not from the plants but from the soil, from Mother Earth.
An important thing to remember is that Nature has found its own ways of fulfilling the needs of all

39
the millions of living beings that have been created in it. This system is not new – it has been
there from millions of years. No agriculture scientist really understands the factors at work here
that allows for such a balance to continue.

“There are at least six forces that are at work in nature to ensure that the balance continues, as
per my understanding. Mitti [Soil], jal [water], vayu [air], vanaspati srishti [forests], prani srishti
[living organisms like animals and birds] and jeeva srishti [smaller beings like insects, microbes
etc.] – using these six factors, all the living organisms of the planet can lead a happy life and
complete their life spans. The synergies between these different factors are in-built into nature.
Soil can regenerate itself and water can cleanse itself with the help of the Sun. With rain, the
forests can revive themselves. The living beings in the forest also get sustenance. No one has the
moral right to intrude into this wonderful system and contaminate it. Farming also should therefore
be the least intrusive into these factors. That is the basic tenet of natural farming. I have evidence
of this in my own farm. I ask the visitors who come to my farm to show me any evidence of
something that I might have done to harm my soil or something that contaminates my water. I
have not done anything that would harm the air there. I do not uproot the weeds there or throw
dangerous chemicals like 2,4-D on them. Do Nothing. And by doing nothing, I have obtained very
good fruits of coconuts and chikoo. No tilling, no weeding, no chemical application.

“Those of you who get degrees from the University cannot get as much produce from a farm as
much as I do by doing nothing. Where there is a dearth of wisdom and knowledge, ignorance is
touted as science. We have never stopped to think what God has given us in abundance, what
nature has given. Other than human beings, there is no one else hankering after business and
profits. The other beings are content just eating what nature has given them. The rest of the
beings are happy and content. If nature could have created such a system for all the other
beings, do you think it has not done so for human beings too, to find happiness and content? Why
are we like this? Is it because the other beings have knowledge about nature whereas we have
chosen to discard that wisdom? Other than human beings, no other organism is trying to be
intrusive and meddling with nature. That is why they are happy. I have chosen not to meddle with
nature. Gandhiji has pointed out that it is best to practice what we want to preach. I have done
that in my farm. This is what I tell all my fellow farmers – leave it to nature and don’t meddle with
it. Learn from other living beings and be happy”.

The Chairperson Sri Sastri pointed out that what Saveji has presented is a concept of non-violent
agriculture as described by others. He felt that it was a much-needed input from Mr Bhaskar
Save – “In India, everyone is supposed to be a Gandhian but we are all forgetting him” – to
understand and practice Gandhiji’s principles related to all aspects of life including agriculture.
We really need to see whether and how we should create a space and chance for Gandhian
perspectives to re-emerge in the present world including in agriculture. The KIA will not promote
or understand such perspectives for sure, he pointed out.
 “Green Revolution: Lessons for any
future Green Revolution from a Science
Studies perspective”

Prof Shiv Visvanathan was the last Panelist who

spoke on “Green Revolution: Lessons for any future
Green Revolution from a Science Studies perspective”.

The following is a transcript of a large part of his talk.

“Listening to the other speakers, I agree with every word

that has been said, am deeply committed to understanding
and saving Indian agriculture and more importantly, the Indian farmer. But this morning I was
asking myself a very simple question - why is it that despite this fantastic knowledge that smoking
is harmful to health we go on smoking? In fact, the biggest increase in smoking is in India and
China, followed by Brazil I think. The second thing I ask myself is - do facts really matter?
Hundreds of facts have been given today. But I know - working with the advertising industry - that
one advertisement can easily defeat thousand facts.

“It is in this context, I want to make my presentation. In fact, I’m not going to use facts; I’m going
to use symbols. I’m not going to use the past because every one who talks about agriculture uses
the past - like, the Indian farmer was a wise person, the boll-weevil was even wiser and so on.
Therefore, I begin with future.

“In 2040, the last Indian farmer was shot dead. It was never reported in any news. Nobody knew
of it till a Rajya sabha member, representing Monsanto, declared it in his report. In fact he even
said, the last Indian farmer is shot dead. It reminded me of the old science fiction novel by
Samuel Butler, where a young man is arrested for being poor and for suffering from Tuberculosis.
The judge delivers the sentence and says, ‘the last two times you were sentenced for chest
infections for fourteen months and two years; but this time for having terminal disease of
tuberculosis, you are sentenced for life’. There is a similar irony when we confront farming.
Devinder confronts facts, Saveji confronts ethics, but no one ever uses the word desire, no one
ever confronted the world of advertising. No one ever seems to realize that if all of Indians would
turn to middle class like America did, we would need the energy system of six planets. No one
ever confronts that. The Indian middle class is more cannibalistic and consumption-oriented
(than any other nationality) short of China. The American middle class would be no match to
their counterparts in either India or China.

“In the same year of 2040, the first Vandana Shiva and Devinder Sharma Awards for NGOs were
given. It was of course given to Shiv Visvanathan, who had designed an equivalent to the E-
choupal (for farmers). He had designed a ‘Policy Choupal’ where hundreds of policy decisions
could be accessed by activists. In those days of 2040, activists were given awards to absorb their
dissent. Shiv Visvanathan like many others advocating organic farming and traditional civilization
got an offer of visiting professorship from a small American University to discuss about ‘traditional
and obsolescence farming’. Simultaneously, there was a newspaper report that hundreds of
American tourists are now-a-days visiting slums in Bombay through what is called slum tourism,
which is a multimillion dollar industry. These were tourists who used to visit suicide areas as part
of suicide tourism.

41
“I don’t mean to be cynical but I think we have to confront these things. We have to confront the
fact that today, an Indian doesn’t have a politics of memory. You can walk through a city and find
most of the slums erased between morning and evening - come back a week later and no one
would ever remember about the slums which disappeared. Why do you expect people to have a
memory of farmers who disappeared? And where do you think this memory is going to be
encapsulated- page-3? Or page 5? And it is in this context I want say that defeat of Indian farmer
has nothing to do with Indian agriculture. It has nothing to do with facts. Defeat of Indian
farming has a lot to do with desire and advertising.

“Once a great advertisement genius asked me, do you know about the 1936 Olympics? India
defeated USA by 26-0 in Hockey, the biggest ever defeat in Hockey history. In the first 10 minutes,
there were no goals. Indians generally play bare feet and in this game, decided to play with
shoes on. Suddenly all of them took off their shoes and played their hockey. The score was 26-
0 eventually and the defeated team was Unites States of America. Would USA have an answer to
this defeat? Yes, they did. They discovered and invented the astro-turf where you cannot play
bare-foot. You need shoes and you need your Nike shoes like your synthetic fertilizers. I think we
have to confront this fact. I would to like emphasize that the new agreements and protocols in
agriculture have got nothing to do with agriculture. It is about desire.

“If you are going to create desire, the first thing you must do is to change the educational policy.
In fact Devinder Sharma was completely right. He said cars cannot compete with tractors. We
did a survey around Delhi and found that the tractor is the family vehicle, which people generally
refer to as Gaddi. The tractor represents desire, the tractor represents affluence, and of course
as Devinder said, tractor also represents suicides. I think we need to understand this and we also
need to understand how advertising controls radicalism. All we have to do is to create a
Demonology. You need one Monsanto and you create an equivalent demonology something around
like Greenpeace. So we create a parallel demonology or create a fixation around one part of the
debate. Sometimes the Demonology is pesticides, at other times the demonology is fertilizers.
But the part should never dominate the whole, because then you will discover the whole is empty.
I think this is the problem we fail to understand. We are competing here with facts; we are
coming here with some kind of politics. You are all Gandhians, or socialists. You all belong to
some kind of nationalist or socialist part. But you are all above forty while the rest of India is
below thirty five. They don’t have your memory, they don’t have your history and they don’t have
your knowledge of agriculture. I don’t think that they know that the Ashok Chakra is on the
National Flag…it is either Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny. I don’t think we have
anything to say to this generation of below thirty five, because we are not speaking their language.
Since you are not speaking their language, the language of farmers committing suicides is not
making any sense to them.

“It destroys the notion of democracy, because democracy is all about contracts, transfer of
technology, elections. With this kind of democracy, we cannot save Indian agriculture. It is the
destruction of the democracy that these protocols bring about by taking it for tacitly granted. The
agriculture we are talking about is no longer agriculture. As one of my expert friends said, at one
time the only culture you had was agriculture, but today the only culture we have is tissue
culture. It is a destruction of certain kind of culture and certain kind of democracy. And it is an
attempt to carry on with a certain picture of science. It reminds me of Peter Drucker’s saying –
‘You cannot carry out a second information revolution with the categories of first industrial
revolution’. You cannot have the new ideas of revolution with the old bureaucratic organization.
This is precisely what the KIA proposal tries to do. It is based on the false history of Land Grant
College history. The Land Grant colleges were regional structures, decentralized, and had local
accountability. We just use the word Land Grant in India without any sense of its history. Indians
are always poor readers of Western history.

“Green Revolution as created by Swaminathan and Subramanian is a successful example of bad

history. I don’t know about agriculture, but I do know something about history, I do know something
about advertising. The first thing we have to realize is the first green revolution was based on the
old categories of nation state, it was based on security, and it was based upon some notions of
science and development. By the time the new green revolution comes in, every one of the
categories of discourse have changed. The idea of science has changed, as Swaminathan himself
acknowledged - once you understand the irony of DDT, science changes. The notion of university
has changed. The idea of nature has changed. The notion of research has changed from public
to private. The idea of property has changed because the idea of Intellectual Property is restored.
The notion of politics has changed. Every major category of discussion has changed - yet the
second green revolution is taking place in the old category. It talks of reviving old agricultural
institutes at a time when privatization has vertically transformed agriculture. At the same time, it
tries to create a demonology that no one seems to confront. This is the sadness of the story. If
radicalism is an example of poor story telling, politics will fail. If you take the best of the story
tellers, Vandana Shiva, she still uses the old Centre-Periphery categories. It is still the language
of old science and old nationalism. It is still a critique of old reductionism. If you take Suman
Sahai, she is still talking about Green Revolution as an example of responsible public science. For
us, the confrontation is between the public and private. But what we are confronting here in the
entire discussion is the language of nation–state and of national science. But India never fought
the debate in national terms. It looked at agriculture always as a civilization problem, as a
nation-state problem, as a civil society problem or a community problem. Unfortunately the
entire discussion is taking place in terms of legal and national discourse, which is why civil
society categories or civilizational categories whether it is those of Gandhi or any one else do not
penetrate the discussion. The discussion is purely legalistic, nationalistic and in terms of the old
view of science.

“It in this context that I want to invent a report that was created and countered. Let me call it as
the Sastri-Chari Report on Alternative Agriculture. Long time ago, Prof Chari invented a term
which I loved - he called it the “bollweevil trade unionism”. He said to everyone attacking the boll
weevil that it actually could be the hero of the story. It could be an early warning system, telling
you that the kind of agriculture that you perform doesn’t conform to Nature. So the boll-weevil,
rather than being a problem, is a symptom of deeper disease. And I think this kind of reading is
what one is missing today. Let me push it further….the Sastri-Chari report argued that the Indo-
US protocols had nothing to do with agriculture. It was an attempt to de-constitutionalize Indian
democracy. The report presents that technology has tacit constitutions around it. Devinder also
made this point. We are looking at Constitution only as a set of laws. We don’t realize that every
contract, every technology, adds a circle of constitution to the standard Constitution. A metric
system is a constitution; a syllabus in science is a constitution. We don’t look at these constitutions.
But these smaller constitutions are de-constitutionalizing the major Constitution. We need a
notion of tacit constitutions to handle the Indo-US protocols. It is not what they say; it is what
they leave unsaid that is so powerfully devastating and genocidal.

“The second point that I wanted make here is that we should ban the word ‘participation’. You
participate after a policy decision is made. You participate long after basic research technologies
are created. Participation always appears at the end of the ritual of democracy. We need a
different kind of notion, an idea of cognitive justice. Participation is a World Bank term. Why
should Indian activists use the term participation? What we need is the Constitution of plural

43
knowledges. India is the home of not only the largest democracy but also a home of greatest
amount of religions and the greatest variety of agricultural systems. We need a Constitution that
is ecologically embedded. We need a Constitution that recognizes at least in the directive principles
of state policy that agriculture and diversity of agriculture needs to be protected. It is no use
protecting a ‘scientific temper’ in the Constitution. What we need is Constitutionality. We need to
protect Indian agriculture, the diversity of agriculture as a constitution fact. No social movement
can guarantee that. That has to be guaranteed by the Constitution. It is the constitutionality of
the [KIA] documents we are now confronting - these are part of law and none of us have
bothered to say these are actually extra legal, paralegal.

“Thirdly, the entire wisdom of the movement so far, from the Emergency to the present, created
a whole series of methodologies on how to look at new technologies. Yet this [KIA] document is
completely deaf to any argument made from Chipko to now, about the critique of science and
technology. Let me sum up what these movements said - they said that a human rights team is
to be attached to any kind of technological project. There should be an ombudsman for any
technology with a guarantee related to right to information and transparency, built into the project.
There should be the possibility of a side bet. The history of modern science says that knowledge
is no longer certain. So why should we invest all the money on one reductionist knowledge -
Genetic Engineering? Why don’t we have alternative solutions to the same problem? That is the
democratic way - in fact, that is the modern scientific way. Modern science can no longer be
reductionist in the sense that the politicians think.

“I think we need ‘referendum & recall’ and insurance for each project. Why can’t projects be
referred on referendum? And if found devastating, why cannot they be recalled and suspended?
If many of these projects are evolutionarily devastating, irreversible in terms of politics of short
term, why can’t they be recalled or suspended? Finally we should have a process of mourning.
Every time these projects do ecological damage, all the survivors gather together and mourn
about the devastation that has been created. Science has no system of mourning. I don’t think
the scientists ever mourn about the Green Revolution, ever mourn about the salinity of the soils
they have created. Green Revolution has no memory. The only memory is by dissenting scientists
sitting here. They are not official; they are like Pepsi – ‘nothing official about it’. But they are the
only memory of the critique of the Green Revolution. Yet the list of the doubts articulated by these
people is never represented in the report [KIA proposal]. There is not a memory of a single doubt
in the entire report about the Green Revolution. And it is fascinating.

“One of the most brilliant things Swaminathan did was to convene three or four seminars on the
history of green revolution on Borlaug’s advice where he showed that he is the only inventor who
creates his own story. From those four seminars he created the transition from the Green Revolution
to the Evergreen Revolution. I’ve done a forty-page analysis to show how he created the continuity.
But what he did by creating a continuation from the first to the second green revolution is to
remove the doubt - he removes the irony, he removes the kind of mistakes that happened, he
makes them sound incidental. You don’t have to have the devastating knowledge of Vandana
Shiva to understand Swaminathan. Swaminathan is a selective amnesiac and so is the protocol.
I don’t think he is a villain, I think it is his brilliance that is devastating. Because he is the policy
scientist who survived all of the independence era and now threatens to survive further. My great
fear is that agriculture may decline but Swaminathan won’t. The role Swaminthan played was to
remove the intuitional doubt on these protocols. Read it - there is not a single line of doubt or
irony in this [KIA] document. So as a literary text, it needs to be abandoned. Its agricultural
qualifications are already in doubt.
“I think we should do what the National Movement did. Even when Gandhi was asked as to what
he thinks of western civilization, he said it is a good idea. Asked about the new green revolution,
I also think it would be good idea. It would be a good idea if we push this revolution into America.
Gandhi in his Hind Swaraj said that the role of the Indian National Movement is to rescue the
West or rescue the British from Modernity. I think the role of new agricultural protocols should be
to rescue America from its agriculture. Why are we so provincial? If America thinks it can rescue
us, why can’t we think we can rescue America? The whole language here is of one-sided rescue,
but as students of the civilization why don’t we tell America as a civilization that we will rescue
you. I’m ready for this document and ready for the protocol if the arrows are reversed or at least
pointing equally in both directions. I’m not interested in ideology. Why can’t India take the role of
rescuing American Agriculture? This point was made poignantly by Jackson. He said, Shiv
Viswanathan, you are a perfect Tamil Brahmin Idiot and if we said that in public it would be quite
devastating. I wanted to know what I did. He replied, ‘You said America is a high information
society and said India is a land of 50,000 rice varieties. And you think America, which had 67
varieties of apples and reduced them to 6, is the high information society?’. Look at the way we
use our terms. It is almost as if we have no memory.

“Why don’t we have the memory of the Indian National Movement which allowed hundreds of
English men to participate and it was determined to rescue the West. Rescuing India is a futile
exercise. India will survive all rescuers. It is the biggest compost pit of defeated battles and
defeated people. I think we should look at the documents, invite the American civil society groups
and say that NO, from today the protocol will cut both ways. We are not going to be consulted in
IT, but we are going to be consulted in traditional agriculture. If we don’t have that confidence, all
we create is local politics, local movements, local Gandhis and stay happy. But that is not going to
keep the new generation happy. The goal of this is to rescue America from what Vandana Shiva
called the monoculture of the mind. There is Bushification of American agriculture and this we
have to fight civilizationally. If we don’t, we will be caught in Nation-State-Science policy documents
which are restricted discourses and restrictive discourses. This document might be agriculturally
adequate but politically inadequate. As a theory of democracy, it is an attempt to rescue western
idea of democracy itself, from the World Bank, from the IMF and from our own political elite. The
original idea of democracy is liberty, equality and fraternity, to which we have added sustainability,
plurality and generosity. It is to combine these two triangles.

“When we talk about soil, we treat it as a metaphor. Let me say how an American University
professor had put it, as we still don’t give legitimacy to our own ideas. When Jenny put a series
of slides in the class and asked the students what they could be. One smart one got up and said
that they were the paintings of Monet. Then he said, no, they are just pictures of different kinds
of soil. We need different kinds of soils to exist for a civilization to survive in a democratic way. It
is no use saving the farmers, if we cannot
save the soil. But where in your
constitutionality have you protected
water, soil and farmers? You have created
an idiotic little social contract which
violates any rule of social contract. You
have restricted it to just a narrow domain
of legal issues and patenting. But a social
contract is a theory of accountability and
responsibility. There is no notion of
accountability and responsibility in the
entire [KIA] document. Transparency at

45
occasional points is not accountability. Yet we all seem to accept this document, when it is utterly
unscientific, utterly uncivilizational, utterly undemocratic, and technologically illiterate. Devinder
has shown the technological illiteracy. So why are we giving it so much importance? No advertising
man would write such a document. And yet we are taking it as a defeated civilization. We are
probably the one continuous civilization in the history of humankind short of the Chinese. Yet
today I heard no one accept that. I’ll just make one last point. We have to change this model of
stakeholder as a model of stockholder. Because the model of stakeholder does not have the
model of rights for the future. The existing model of stakeholder does not have the rights of
extinct and disappearing populations. I want all the tribes who are lost to be rewritten in that
model of stakeholder or otherwise, many of them are going to disappear soon. Why should the
stakeholder mean just mainstream stakeholders? To me the real sadness is no one is attacking
it as a cultural document, as a democratic document, which seems to imitate its language of
technology. We even seem to respect its credentials for science. This is a hypocritical document
created by a bunch of scientists who have no memory and are desperate for another round of
research grants”.

DISCUSSION AFTER THE PANEL PRESENTATION

1. Mr Narayan Reddy from Tirupati felt that whatever damage could be done through the
American model of education has been done and now we need to think about the future
course. The Indian farmer is at crossroads and what is the intelligentsia of the country
recommending to them, he wanted to know. He also felt that in practice, nothing prevents
our scientists from doing research and upgrading breeds – why are they so keen to hear
from people abroad about how this should be done? He also wanted to know from Sri
Bhaskar Save whether his farm is self-sustaining and whether he has any other source
of income.
2. Dr J Venkateswarlu from Hyderabad observed that the biggest task is to help and
support small and marginal farmers to make a decent living out of farming. How do we
provide livelihood support systems for them, he wanted to know.
3. Dr N K Sanghi from Hyderabad recalled the response of Indian scientists to the Indo-US
nuclear deal where they had an ‘alternative view’, and ‘indigenous view’. However, he
wonders if such a conviction will ever be there amongst stakeholders in an alternative
paradigm in agriculture, especially when the agricultural education model itself is imported.
If there is conviction for alternatives, will it ever find a voice? How can space be provided
to such voices?
4. Dr Vadde Sobhanadeeswar Rao, former Minister for Agriculture, Government of
Andhra Pradesh pointed out that there are serious reservations with regard to health
and environmental aspects of GM crops. On the other hand, there is also tremendous
diversity in crops of the country without the full potential being exploited. Since 60% of
the cropped area is dependent on rains and 80% of our farmers are small farmers, he
wondered if there is a possibility of developing and bringing out drought tolerant varieties
of crops without biotechnology [transgenic technology].
5. Sri Vijay Jawandhia from Wardha said that we should first understand the genetic
modification is not to increase the yield and it is mostly to manage some weeds and
pests. As per latest reports from China, though specific pests decreased in numbers
after the use of Bt Cotton, other pests have increased and consequently, pesticide usage.
Similarly, in Vidarbha, Bt Cotton has failed totally….nobody’s studying why and how it
has failed. Though acreage has increased considerably, yields are worse than last year.
Even companies are accepting that with Bt Cotton, more fertilizers and micro-nutrients
have to be applied. So, these are no magic or miracle seeds as they are being projected.
 Regarding the KIA proposals, it seems to be about replacing human labour from
agriculture, to promote industrial agriculture. We are only aiding a humanless agriculture
system by accepting GE seeds, he observed.
6. Dr Balaravi from Chennai observed that in the present discussion, there are considerable
points of agreement and disagreement. Agriculture is a complex phenomenon and it is
not only productivity but final income that is important for the farmer. Farmers also have
desires and aspirations to have a modern life style. On 3 to 5 acres of land, how can all
the expenses of a farming household including on healthcare, education etc., be met?
Farm sizes are reducing generation to generation. Absolute human load on farming is
increasing day by day. As a person who has been a Scientist in public sector research, I
cannot ridicule any effort that India has made on the food production front. Today, after
achieving food self sufficiency, we seem to be going back to imports again, because we
are diversifying food production areas to commercial crop areas. This is a matter of
grave concern. A country cannot survive without food security and cannot depend on
food imports. We cannot compromise on our food security – whatever technology’s
available, we have to use it, he felt.
7. Prof Rama Melkote from Hyderabad observed that most of us are disillusioned by the
situation around us today, reiterated by presentations in the workshop so far. She
wondered how the current generation thinks of alternatives with a different background
of ambitions, desires and dreams. We have many established alternatives all around….if
we are changing the terms of discourse [and leaving it to the younger generation], will
it have the strength to counter the onslaught coming our way? We talk a lot about civil
society and what it should do but not how the State should respond. Why have we
forgotten about the Nation State and its role in this, because ultimately policies are
made by the state, she wanted to know.
8. Dr Uma Shankari reminded everyone that some of the atomic scientists felt extremely
guilty after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and resolved that they would not make such weapons
again. Yet atomic research continued. Will that be the fate of GM research too, no matter
what the damage on the ground, she wondered. Is it linked to a youthful instinct to
dissect and experiment? How does one exercise social control on such instincts? She
also wondered how we can accept it if normal agriculture is meant only for small pockets
and “museumised”, while the rest of agriculture is being taken over by GM. How are we
going to address this question of what is normal agriculture and what is abnormal, she
wanted to know.
9. Mr Dinesh Kumar from Anantapur had a point to make in response to the question
raised by Dr Vadde Sobhanadeeswara Rao on drought tolerant seeds without GM. He felt
that we have actually done more damage to the soil through the use of chemicals in
terms of its ability to address droughts. Unlike organics, such soils cannot hold the rain
or moisture. When the life in the soil is gone, agriculture in general – GM or no GM – will
not survive, he said. It is the lack of basic understanding of agriculture in our scientists
that is driving them to all kinds of expositions and experiments. We are not looking into
soil but are driven by oil. You will be given some subsidy to buy a tractor but none when
you go to buy bullocks or bullock carts which will feed the soil. Soil, which has to address
all the vagaries of nature, is not addressed. Addressing one aspect of seeds will not
solve our problems. This is the biggest mistake we are committing. Many of our minor
millets have completely disappeared. People seem to have forgotten that these crops
existed. We need to go back to the basics, he felt.
10. Mr Raja Ram of Trichy suggested that the name of KIA be changed to Indo-US Business
Initiative instead of Knowledge Initiative. He pointed out that even the Green Revolution
was such a business initiative more than anything else. He also reminded the participants

47
 that most eminent, honoured scientists repented at the end of their lives after discovering
their ignorance and witnessing the damage they caused, if you go by their biographies.
Why is it that the Indian scientists still hesitate to repent, after the mistakes of the GR?

The following points came up from the panel speakers, in response to the discussion raised by
the participants:

Mr Devinder Sharma:

• I think most people have not even analysed the problem in a right perspective. What is
the solution and way forward can come only after that. Right now, it has become the
story of the four blind men and the elephant. I thin the way forward was provided by Sri
Bhaskar Save in a philosophical fashion. Wherever such systems are being followed,
there is clear evidence that they are doing remarkably well. If we refuse to acknowledge
them we are losing important evidences. The Malthusian arguments have been proven
wrong quite clearly. Bhaskar Save’s farm produces and enhances food production
capacities all the time. You protect nature, the environment, you don’t increase your cost
of production and yet your food production does not fall in such a model – what more do
you want? Even CSA’s own experiment in villages like Punukula shows that yields are
high even without the use of chemicals like pesticides. These evidences are available the
worldover. However, policies are linked to the private sector quite closely. We somehow
have not been able to stand up and challenge their arguments for discounting such
strong evidence from the ground.
• About the role of agricultural scientists, they were happy to take credit for GR. However,
when problems are coming up, they are washing their hands off to put the onus on the
political system. They would like to say that farmers are dying because of political mistakes
and not because of scientists and their technologies. They are going on holding workshops
on GE in all these universities…however, in the last ten years, the ICAR has never held
even one meeting on farmers’ suicides. It is very clear whose interests they represent.
They should be held accountable for farmers’ suicides at least now. If we hold them
accountable, farmers’ suicides will begin to come down. They are the people who are
causing the problem and don’t want technologies that really work for farmers and are
sustainable. Despite all the technology and productivity boosts in the past four decades
that they boast about, why is farmers’ income still a meager Rs. 2150/- or so? What are
these huge departments of agricultural economics doing? The industry’s moved on from
chemical sciences to ‘Life Sciences’ – our scientists are ready to move on to life sciences
too.
• In this situation, I think we have to provide the farmers with an assured income, first and
foremost. There is already a sixth pay commission to look into salaries of employees.
There should be an income commission for farmers along similar lines. We should make
it into decoupled payments like in the US and make it WTO-compliant. That is the model
that we need to bring into our country from there to save our farmers, the way they are
saving theirs. If we can blindly adopt anything from outside, let us not be ashamed of
adopting this direct support to farmers. Since they argue that this does not distort trade,
we can also start providing direct support to farmers. The Sixth Pay Commission creates
an additional burden of one lakh crores to the exchequer every year and this goes to a
class that does not deserve such support. Farmers need such support and this is probably
the answer to the crisis that we see around us.
• The solutions also don’t lie in models of Micro-Finance as someone was suggesting this
morning. While you and I get loans for cars and air conditions at 5% or 8% interest, why
 should the poorest woman of this country access loans from a micro-finance firm to
purchase a goat at 24% rate of interest? While everybody talks about empowering the
women through micro-finance, we are in reality only replacing the money lender with
organized micro-finance along the same exploitative terms. If this is empowering, I
don’t understand why we are not being empowered at this rate of interest in the cities
and middle classes, while only the poor are being empowered?
• On the nuclear scientists and their indigenous view, the Chair felt that it was only a
semblance of a fight that they put up and it might be a wrong example to pick up. There
are many views on their view too. The question really is where are agricultural scientists
in this country with a stomach to put up even a semblance of a fight? Agricultural scientists
should stand up and demand for a discussion with the Prime Minister about the crisis
around us today. However, they did not and would not. Let us not depend on some
scientists and policy makers. Let us take the first step in a manner that the rest have to
follow.
• On crops that are drought-resistant, salt-resistant etc., the GM industry is only building
castles in the air. So far, no GM crop has crossed the productivity barrier. The industry
actually hides the fact that in most field trials, it is clearly established that yields actually
go down with GE. Even with regard to health implications, the FDA had hidden lots of
things from public glare. It took a Tsunami for us to realize the salt-resisting capabilities
of some our traditional rice varieties. The kind of diversity available in India is suitable
for an enormous variety of situations. We have more than 160,000 crop species lying in
the NBPGR but our scientists are not going and looking at them. It is unfortunate that for
traits like drought resistance, our scientists do not want to look at our own varieties.

Dr Shiv Visvanathan:

• We have got a terrific critique of production and distribution earlier – we need to extend
it to consumption also. By doing that, we can engage with the present generation. This
middle class critique of consumption has to be a part of our thinking – we cannot do it in
the terms of the old Marxist, Socialist or Gandhian categories, however. We need to find
a different language for that.
• (Responding to Dr Bala Ravi’s serious objection to personal comments made against
some individuals) – As a science policy analyst, I feel that major figures of public science
have to be discussed openly. That is part of the burden as well as part of the privilege of
these public figures. I cannot deny them their role in public policy making and they
cannot deny me my role as a science policy critic. What I have said can be evaluated by
others in terms of our professions. Green Revolution was a state policy and the ever
green revolution is also a meditational state policy of what is left of state policy. This has
to be discussed openly.

The Chairperson for the session, Sri M V Sastri, reiterated the right of speakers and participants
to make their point and not construe comments as derogatory. He requested the participation of
everyone to enrich the deliberations.

He also concluded the session by making a few remarks. “It was wonderful to listen to Bhaskar
Saveji. It is very evocative of a bygone era and how people were motivated by Gandhi’s experiments.
Perhaps they are still relevant today. Devinder gave a very alarming picture while describing the
situation we are facing today. Shiv was devastating in his analysis of various players – how to
convert various things he said into actionables is not immediately clear. Coming to suicides, have
we really created a situation in this country that farmers think of suicides also as an option [like

49
the option of chemical agriculture, option of NPM, option of GE and so on]? Have we become a
culture (like in Japan) that committing suicide is an embedded option which is quite acceptable?
We have to address many of these questions and the speakers gave us all quite a few important
thoughts to ponder about and address. I thank all of them for their wonderful presentations and
the participants for the energetic discussions that followed”.
 SESSION 2: Theme 1 of KIA

Human Resource & Institutional Capacity Building

(Agricultural Research & Education)

This session was chaired by Dr M S Chari, noted entomologist and ex-Director, Central Tobacco
Research Institute. He made a few remarks from the Chair before inviting the speakers to make
their presentations. He felt that it was very unfortunate and painful to see that no ICAR official is
interested in participating in a workshop like this. “We tried our best to rope in ICAR officials
including the Director General. I spoke with him personally and we sent several letters. However,
no one seems ready to come”, he said. Their presence would have added to the richness of the
discussions here, he added.

“Agricultural Research & Education in India – Need for a

revamp”

The first speaker was Dr J Venkateswarlu, Soil Scientist

and Ex-Director of Central Arid Zone Research Institute [CAZRI].
He spoke on “Agricultural Research and Education in India
– Need for a revamp”. Some of the main points from his
presentation are given below in a concise form:

• The present agricultural research has a highly

reductionist approach – grow this crop, give this type of input,
apply this much fertilizer and this is the yield, says this model.
What happens to the rest of the environment in which the crop
is grown? There is a need for a dialectical perspective on research
and development of agriculture. Which means, try and see the
effects of the plant on the environment when you put the fertilizer
and not just the other way round. It is a perspective which requires you to read all things
together. Had we done this in our agriculture research and development, perhaps things
would have been different today for Indian agriculture.
• An analysis of the ecological damage and technology fatigue that the Planning Commission
now speaks about has to be made as to why they have occurred. Soil physical chemistry
teaches you that Nature adjusts to dynamic changes and that is how it is formed. Soil
takes thousands of years to form one inch or centimeter of soil, which happens due to
adjustments made to dynamic changes. We have allowed degradation of such a resource.
The former Director of IARI is talking about a fatigue in development of varieties also –
particularly about wheat. Many of us realize the enormous loss of biodiversity that we
allowed. What is also disturbing is that there is a deceleration in all production systems
– response to fertilizers is constantly decreasing, for instance. At another level, we are
increasingly importing our food grains – two million tonnes of pulses each year (as much
as we produce) and this year, 5.5 million tonnes of wheat. Meanwhile, 40% of farmers
are willing to leave farming in case there is a viable alternative available.
• We have neglected small holders in particular in rainfed farming in general. We should
let the extension requirements of irrigated farmers be taken care of by the farmers
themselves. It is the rainfed areas where the poorest live and that is where the ecological

51
 conditions are fairly disturbing. It is now recognized that rainfed agriculture is the future
in India.
• Synergies between crop-livestock and crop-tree farming have long been ignored by us.
These are very relevant and more so for smallholders.
• GM crops have shown that there are no breakthroughs on the yield front with that approach.
Improved agronomy or better crop husbandry is what we need.
• As the National Agricultural Research System was starved of funds, World Bank funded
projects like the National Agricultural Technology Project [NATP, also interpreted within
the system as National Air Travel Programme] were brought in. Small holders were not
the focus of such a project. It was assumed that the problems of such farmers were
known and solutions were also known. Things pointed out for improvement in reviews
were not taken on board. A perpetual dependence on external funds is a continuing
theme in NATP. Now, we have the National Agricultural Innovation Project, the NAIP. It is
still not known where that is headed. The focus is on poorer regions in the NAIP but it
mostly calls for Public Private partnerships and the place of farmers is very unclear.
Livelihood support systems have been mentioned but who will deliver these is not clear.
People in charge are trying to run here and there to learn from civil society about such
livelihood support systems as they are not accustomed to such an approach.
• We should also tackle a syndrome called TINA – There Is No Alternative that came in
with the Green Revolution and is all pervasive. Regenerative agriculture or LEISA require
as much support as was extended to the Green Revolution. GR had research support that
was public-funded. It had other support systems like marketing, price support etc. The
same needs to be extended to the rainfed farmer or poor producer who grows other
crops.
• Soil organic matter has to be maintained through regenerative systems. The GR approach
only makes the soil die, along with secondary effects like pollution and ecological damage.
• It is true that labour requirements are less in chemical agriculture compared to
regenerative systems. That is why some of us demand that let support or funds be
invested for meeting additional labour requirements so that it is win-win situation for
farmers and workers.
• Aggressive marketing, as much as faulty technologies, has caused the distress all around
us, including the suicides. Both Vidarbha in Maharashtra and Warangal district in Andhra
Pradesh were living very nicely as productive areas, with excellent crops. However, they
were made to shift to a mono-crop. Very poor producers who could not bear any sort of
risks too shifted and got into serious trouble. This is again because of aggressive
marketing.
• On the food security front, the GR advocates congratulate themselves that food security
has been achieved. However, if you go by the definition of international institutes like
FAO or the WB, we are far away from achieving food security even today. Even during
the colonial times, famines were not because of lack of food but because of lack of
purchasing power. If we can create agricultural livelihood systems that can generate
employment and income, purchasing power is taken care of and food security can be
achieved. It cannot be achieved just by growing a GM crop. ICAR seems to be talking
about a GM solution for everything. For removing harmful substances in crops – like
neurotoxin from Kesari dal, aflotoxins in groundnut, avoiding undesirable elements in
crops like chickpea, sweetpea, potato etc. Aggressive marketing of GM crops has even
eclipsed the research efforts of the public sector – what happened to all the cotton
varieties and hybrids that the public sector is supposed to have developed? Nobody talks
about even hybrids about which everyone talked about as though they had achieved a
 great thing. Now, they talk only about Bt. Now, GE crops are replacing cheaper, local
alternatives. Golden Rice instead of drumstick, for example.
• Can biotechnology induct C-4 pathway into C-3 plants, as C-3 plants cannot withstand
the disadvantages of drought? Are there any nitrogen fixing cereals around through this
technology? Is it because the nitrogen industry does not want it? What we really need is
breeding for the low nutrient environment.
• Coming to micro-nutrients, some institutes like ICRISAT call them as site-specific
management. NCF also suggests similar things – do soil testing and apply micronutrients.
It is not clear how the quality of such inputs will be regulated and ensured. The KIA
however is suggesting that let us use biotechnology for improved micro-nutrient efficiency.
The easy way on the other hand is application of some organic manures which farmers
can do by themselves. This improves soil productivity as well as soil physical conditions.
• Regarding water management, there are a lot of proposals in the KIA - quality
management, remediation, modern tools in integrated water management and drought
proofing and so on, almost leading us to precision farming, which means lot of equipment
imported from outside. There are tremendous knowledge systems available within the
country and with communities as far as water management systems are concerned. We
have here traditional water harvesting systems, community management of water, and
even the poorest quality of water and soil being managed by the farmers. When I went
to Jalgaon, I saw a low lying patch of soil where the soil is highly alkaline – here, they put
salt water / saline water to make it aggregate. Similarly if you take water management
or nutrient management, there exists so much wisdom in the farming community
particularly in the high rainfall zones, like paddy cum fish culture, jabo farming in Nagaland,
paddy cum duck farming and so on, where integration is there, of crop livestock particularly
the small ruminants as well as the birds. Then we have the four water concept on how
to integrate the use of different waters. This is already practiced. It is an excellent
system where the community knows what to do, how much water would be available,
how to use the water etc - a community based decision is taken. Now SRI cultivation is
a community initiative. Somehow there is a great hostility from the NARS against this.
These kinds of systems are already available – the need seems to be for us to find out
what is available before getting into such bilateral agreements.
• The largest knowledge bank is our small holder. Many centuries of human scientific
research is orally transmitted and it requires to be documented. At least the civil society
must come forward. ICAR tried to do this, but they only had put what is being practiced,
what is the science behind it is not dealt by them, while they are supposed to do that.
• The Extension Education network is very large in our country. There are 543 Krishi
Vigyan Kendras [KVKs] in the country. There are also eight TTCs whose job is frontline
demonstrations, Technology Assessment and Refinement programmes etc. We should
think of a Centre for Advancement of Participatory Technology Development, like CAPART.
• In our Extension work, we do not find much of transfer of technology but only transfer of
research. This is done essentially by giving out doles, free seeds, fertilizers etc. There is
no strength in it – once withdrawn, the farmer also withdraws. However, when a
technology is useful, you see farmers’ own initiative taking over like in the case of CYMMIT’s
wheat or canola from Canada or Mushuri from Malaysia and Indonesia. Extension is
slowly being privatized today. Agri-clinics are being set up. The public extension system,
which is under-funded and demoralized, is being called names and it is said that it is
useless. However, if it is strengthened by funding, it will definitely stand up to the
expectation and need of the hour. Such extension support should move beyond agriculture
to include livelihood support and should be pluralistic. There is a need for decentralization

53
 – let there be innovations and let extension systems scale up islands of excellence and
innovations.
• At present, the way to finance extension education seems to be to identify a training
centre, move finances to them and they in turn render services to the clientele. The
training centre is made accountable only to the public finance and not to the users or
clientele. A suggestion is that funds should go directly to the clientele. Fortunately, many
of the users are federated and organized as self help groups and they in turn can find
who can train them well, help build their capacities and in that process, accountability is
oriented towards them. This is a very challenging change that must be taken up.
“Agriculture Research in India – Farmers’ Needs & Knowledge”

Sri Jacob Nellithanam was the next speaker. He spoke

about “Agriculture Research in India – Farmers’ Needs &
Knowledge”. The following are the main points made by Mr
Nellithanam, who had a chance to work for a brief period with
Dr Richharia when he was trying to develop and conserve
varieties with indigenous groups and farmers’ groups all over
India.

• We should understand the philosophy of Green

Revoluiton better to understand the current situation in
agriculture. For instance, Arthur Moses, the US Agriculture
Development Council President said that the cooperative social
structure of agrarian societies had to be dismantled to bring in the market place, so that
US interests can be enhanced. The biggest problem for world economic policy and
increased investments was that of Under-development and according to Nelson Rockefeller,
the correct response to this should be to widen the US national interests. This meant
that the first objective of US policy should be to increase food production in under-
developed areas by just 25% so that they are brought barely above their minimum food
needs. This is what the Green Revolution was, politically, for the USA.
• In the 1950s, the average yield per hectare of rice in India was 668 kilos. In 1961-66, it
was 986. The increase post GR is about 90% by 1980s, which has been achieved at a
very high cost. If you look at the productivity shown by farmers through crop competitions,
even 13 tonnes per hectare have been recorded as farmers’ yields and these are records
available for scrutiny in some British Gazetteers.
• If we look at the per capita net availability of food grains per year, in 1961, the cereal
availability was 145 kilos and in 1995, it was 163. Corresponding figures for total food
grains’ per capita net availability per year is 171 kilos in 1961 and 176.7 kilos in 1995.
This is the food availability that has been achieved with so much cost. If we look at the
total quality of food and divide it into pulses, cereals, oilseeds and so on, the situation is
worse. We say that we have achieved food self sufficiency and that it is only a problem
of distribution. But if you look at the pre-GR period, there was a 50% growth in production
and productivity. In just ten years’ time, this was possible with indigenous genetic
resources and with the initiative of farmers. Shouldn’t we then take up the mourning
period as suggested by Dr Shiv Visvanathan this morning to understand what we have
really done.
• Dr Richharia was a leading rice scientist within the agricultural research establishment
of India. He opposed the introduction of Green Revolution and the so-called miracle
seeds. He was removed from the agricultural system. He worked with the Madhya Pradesh
government to prove that the indigenous genetic resources have great potential. He
collected about 19000+ accessions from Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh put together.
He has selected 1600 pure line selections from these collections which had a potential of
yielding upto 4 to 9 tonnes per hectare. These are indigenous selections without a long
term breeding programme. What have we done to so much diversity and such high yield
potential? If you look at whole of the country and genetic resources we have lost, we
eliminated all possibilities of yield growth, which could be done by simple facilitation
process, farmers’ initiative and bare minimum support such as supplementary irrigation
system, tank irrigation systems and so on.

55
• So where have all these genetic resources ended up. Like Devinder Sharma mentioned,
it has ended up in Fort Collins. All the wheat diversity we have is not there in Karnal now
- it has ended up in CYMMIT and Fort Collins. The rice diversity has ended up in IRRI and
from there to Fort Collins.
• Our solutions lie in reclaiming the diversity and knowledge of indigenous people. It is
estimated that NBPGR might have about 40,000 rice accessions, CRRI Cuttack might
have 25,000 collections, IGAU-Raipur has Richaria’s collection of 23,000 accessions,
IRRI has more than 80,000 accessions and ICRISAT has a mandated crop diversity of
1,26,000 accessions [out of which 26,000 accessions are from India alone].
• Experience shows that simple pure line selection or adaptive selection of varieties can
provide solutions to farmers. Plant breeding is essentially an endless selection process –
but that is possible only if you have diversity to begin with.
• Such solutions will no longer be possible or be easy because we now have IPR regimes
in place. We have the Plant Varieties Protection Act here which creates plant breeder
rights. Essentially, the laws are about plant breeders’ rights. Our scientists in Public-
Private Partnerships will create intellectual property rights over these resources which
have come from indigenous people and farming communities. While the ICAR talks about
Traditional Knowledge etc., there are no records kept of the resources that are being
held with the NBPGR and other institutes even though this is our cultural heritage. It is
such valuable heritage that Syngenta had tried to lay its hands on through a formal
collaboration with the IGAU in Raipur. It is essentially a process by which formal agreements
bound by IPRs will allow access to our heritage, for monopolization of the same varieties
in the name of R & D and to put the very same seeds back into the public domain but with
an IPR tag. This is going to happen with the KIA also.
• The answer to this has to be a reclamation of our bio-cultural heritage, what we call as
knowledge and resources embedded in seeds. If you put the seeds back into the field, it
can generate its own knowledge and can regenerate the system. We can still reclaim
our soils if we have diversity and if we can produce biomass in any kind of situation. The
Chattisgarh farmers want their traditional diversity back from the germplasm centres
but policy does not allow it – it has become State property. In a bilateral agreement like
the KIA, others seem to have access to such resources but not the farmers who have
contributed to it! We have to find ways of reclaiming, regaining and restoring that diversity
with the people.
 “Innovative Indo-US Collaborations: Missed Opportunities”

Dr Shambu Prasad spoke next on “Innovative Indo-US Collaboration: Missed

Opportunities”.

• A science studies perspective tells you that science and

technology are made by humans and they are very
political, shaped by social actors. In India, the process of
science policy-making or understanding science is not in
proportion to the human power that we have. An
important question to be asked is whether a science
studies perspective can lead to better science policy
making. Put differently, can science and technology in a
particular context indeed be otherwise? How does one
then try to incorporate alternative imaginations in the
process of making an S & T policy? The questions to be
asked include, have there been other Indo-US
collaborations that are somewhat different from the Land
Grant models that can offer insights to the current day
institutions and institutional mechanisms?
• The KIA hardly has a mention of the present agrarian crisis in India. There are many
other things like workshops, reviews, planning and building institutional capacities,
extension and outreach activities and so on. Would these really transform Indian
agriculture? The KIA seems to be something happening in isolation. Who exactly are the
beneficiaries is a simple question to be asked while talking about institutional mechanisms.
It is important to place KIA in relation to some ongoing global initiatives – for example,
the institutional learning from change initiative which is part of the CGIAR. This asks
different questions like whether international research centres are really equipped to
deal with issues of poverty, sustainability and so on. The UN Millennium Report on Science
& Technology, for example, is looking at curriculum development in the context of
Millennium Development Goals. The EU’s Research and Technology Development
framework has been applied quite successfully in the African, Caribbean and Pacific
regions, where, before establishing a particular policy in a particular area, all kinds of
people are involved in the decision-making related to strategy. It is not clear how KIA
relates to the ongoing debates on institutions and institutional mechanisms when it comes
to S&T policy-making and decision-making.
• It was discussed earlier about old institutions and new mandates. Some of the new
mandates came out of failure of the earlier mandates. The simple goal of increasing
food supplies probably worked well in the earlier context. However, today we want poverty
reduction, environmental sustainability, MDGs being achieved, solution to the farming
crisis and so on. The Institutional Learning and Change initiative suggests that you need
to re-work and recast your institutions if newer mandates have to be fulfilled. It is
suggested that there should be less isolation and more inter-connectedness and more
response to emerging needs. Also accepted is the fact that the traditional transfer of
technology model has not quite worked and that it can no longer keep pace with the
diverse, complex, risk prone and dynamic situations of poor farmers.
• One obviously has to have a different set of governing structures than exists now for the
reform to take place. In the KIA, for instance, there is mention of one NGO from the
American side but none from the Indian side. India is well known for its rich civil society
experience but that is not reflected in the KIA formulation.
57
• A forgotten Indo-US collaboration which provides other ways of thinking is set 90 years
back in time – the work of Sam Higginbotham in establishing the Allahabad Agricultural
Institute in the early 1910s. When Sam Higginbotham came to India and established the
Institute, it was not as though it was the first agricultural institute. But his purpose was
somewhat different. It was a different imagination that was worth exploring. It was not
based on the Land Grant lines or the T&V (Travel & Vanish?) models. It was to try and
have what Higginbotham would call scientifically trained farmers and for which he felt
there was a need for the nation at that particular point of time. Some of the pioneering
things that he had done include the first ever Agricultural Engineering course, one of the
earliest schemes in agricultural extension and women’s development etc. The Institute
also had a very strong social science unit and their agricultural extension experiments
were very interesting. All of this was ignored by the Imperial Council for Agricultural
Research but was closely followed by Gandhi. Gandhi in fact wanted Higginbotham to be
a Member of the Board of Advisors to the All India Village Industry Association. Gandhi,
for instance, wrote to Higginbotham after the Bihar earthquake in 1934 and requested
him to come and see the affected areas and advise about how water logged soils can be
drained, how to remove the sand which covered the fields. He wrote, ‘you know my
regard for your expert knowledge – even if you do not show us anything new, I personally
will have the satisfaction that you have seen that area’. Gandhi also invited Higginbotham
to head the Congress’s agricultural wing which was not possible in the British rule and
Higginbotham declined. Higginbotham later went to Cornell to do some more serious
work on agriculture. The four volumes of Randhawa’s book on History of Indian Agriculture
may not have any work of Higginbotham mentioned but I think his was a model which
has relevance in the context of the KIA.
• Another example is a fairly recent one which is also an example of a different kind of
Indo-US collaboration – a bit more silent and less published but many farmers and
members of the civil society are aware of the kind of collaboration that is going on. This
is an example which has a positive spin to America’s contribution to agricultural
development, [unlike the other stories we have been hearing from the morning today].
This is the story of System of Rice Intensification or SRI. An exciting development in
Madagascar has spread quite rapidly to many other parts of the world over a period of
10-15 years, thanks to a different US interest and a different view of knowledge. This is
about the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture & Development [CIIFAD]
and Dr Norman Uphoff. When Uphoff visited many ICAR institutes in early 2000, he
received a very lukewarm response. Similar responses in Punjab which he was targeting
initially given the large cultivation of paddy there. Then he came to South India, inviting
responses from state governments and agricultural universities here. Here, it was probably
the crisis of drought and water that made the governments, politicians and scientists bet
on the SRI offer. They seemed to have responded to an emerging situation. CIIFAD
facilitated the exchange of some top scientists from the agricultural research
establishments to look at SRI further. The facilitation was not to go to America to learn
more about SRI but to go to Srilanka, to learn from practicing farmers like Premaratne.
From Andhra Pradesh, the Director of Extension in the Agriculture University, Dr Alapati
Satyanarayana also went to Srilanka. He recounts that he was extremely skeptical at
that point of time. But he changed his understanding soon after going there and that was
a kind of watershed with regard to ‘official SRI’ as far as Andhra Pradesh is concerned.
• It is a case of facilitated exchange not just to America but to a larger pool of knowledge.
Dr Alapati Satyanarayana, a plant breeder was able to understand SRI in a different
manner which probably Dr Uphoff found useful. These debates still do not get reflected
in the international agricultural knowledge domains yet but are spreading through small
 informal networks across the world. The key thing about SRI is the very deliberate effort
by CIIFAD and the Madagascar NGO called ATS which are trying to maintain knowledge
in the public domain. What is interesting that even today, it is possible for knowledge
flows to occur in a manner that it benefits farmers without going through the formal,
expensive, discriminatory and exclusive intellectual property regime. The SRI kind of
Indo-US collaboration shows that global networks do help in today’s world, if they are
representative, transparent, participatory and accountable.
• Innovations have to be seen as part of the global commons and not just restricted to
bilateral deals. SRI represents an alternative paradigm in agriculture research – technically,
an alternative in understanding plants and their eco-systems. Institutionally, an alternative
in knowledge flows and use. Dr Uphoff says that at one level, SRI is about how to grow
rice differently but it is also a way to understand soil biology, role of root systems etc. –
domains that have been completely ignored not only by Indian scientists but agricultural
scientists across the world. Here is an interesting research domain which needs certain
kinds of investment to bring newer knowledge which make better insights of farmers
own experiences. This is about what Dr Uphoff calls as “Post Modern Agriculture”. It is
about a different view of agriculture, based on a new outlook which takes serious
cognizance of the energy and ecological crises around us.
• What is exciting about a post modern view of agriculture is the way future is being
looked at – a rainbow kind of revolution that agricultural scientists need to seriously
engage with. What can KIA learn from the Higginbotham experiment in Allahabad or the
SRI story unfolding around us? These examples need to be seen as exemplars for providing
not very common kind of knowledge. They do not say that science & technology are not
necessary for development – they only show that there are alternative ways of looking at
it and doing the same research differently. These initiatives are not narrow in their vision
but have a clear central role for farmers in agricultural development. These initiatives
believed in knowledge being in the public domain and there are many things that KIA in
particular and Indian agricultural research in general, have to learn from such examples.

After Dr Shambu Prasad’s presentation, there was a discussion on this first Theme of the KIA and
the three presentations made under the Theme.

DISCUSSIONS AFTER PRESENTATIONS ON THEME 1 OF THE KIA

1. Dr Sivaraj informed the participants (responding to Jacob Nellithanam’s presentation

that out of ICRISAT’s gene bank accessions, 26,000 belong to India) that 35000 accessions
of germplasm have been retrieved by India and the NBPGR is maintaining these in the
national gene bank. Similarly, initiatives are being taken to retrieve all other accessions
that originally belong to India such as the rice collection in IRRI, he informed. He also
wanted a clarification on Jacob’s presentation about per capita food availability during
the 1950s and in 1995 – what was the population in 1950s and what was it in 1995, he
wanted to know.
2. Mr A P Rao pointed out that compared to the GR time, the perspectives of the Government
of India and the American government are totally different from what they were then.
Welfare states were strong in both countries during the GR era. In fact, the spirit of
Indian government was to attain food security and to attain self sufficiency. Now, the
strategy of India is to join the mainstream of globalization and be a second partner to
the global masters. The Land Grant system and its consequences are therefore irrelevant

59
 now, he felt. He also felt that there have not been enough discussions on what will the
impacts of KIA on people of this country….what does it mean to you and me, he wanted
to know.
3. Mr Narendranath had some points to make next. He felt that the analysis on GR should
incorporate aspects that have been touched here (population, actual gains in productivity,
per capita net availability, area of cultivation increasing, surface irrigation etc.) as well
as some untouched aspects like groundwater irrigation and extent of area under
cultivation decreasing or stagnant. While we talk about the crisis of farming and a second
green revolution, it needs an express recognition of the need for delearning by the
establishment. While sustainable agriculture or organic agriculture is being proven as a
viable option by many pioneers and thousands of farmers on the ground, even the NCF
continues to look at organic farming as a niche, export-oriented movement. A strong
critique of this is necessary. That is possible only if there is an initiative from the farmers’
side in the form of an organic farmers’ union. More importantly, a question that bothers
is whether we are trying to fight history when trying to protect farmers. As time goes by,
how are we going to make small and marginal farmers live in dignity and make enough
surplus for the economics to work out? In a pessimistic sense, if we look at experiences
from various developed and developing countries, be it communist or capitalist societies,
all models seem to have the same base of decreasing agricultural share in the entire
economy and decreasing role for farmers and decreasing number of farmers. The farming
community ultimately seems to vanish. Are we fighting a civilisational question, then?
4. Mr Afsar Jafri from Mumbai had a question for Dr J Venkateswarlu – is there any direct
connection between NAIP and KIA. Will NAIP be used to push the agenda of KIA, he
wanted to know.
5. Mr Sreedhar from Kerala said that a critique of the KIA specially in terms of agricultural
research and education proposals was missing in the presentations. And because of
this, there was no paradigm that emerged that could be put forward as our alternative.
6. Mr Nimmaiah pointed out that various programmes that were launched right from the
1960s have veered farmers away from their traditional practices and resources. He
pointed out that a lot of damage has been done to our soils in this quest for increased
production. He felt strongly that if we continue the present way, the situation will only
deteriorate further. He said that it would be worthwhile to talk about reviving sustainable
agriculture and alternatives some more. We have to look at alternatives in a more intensive
and aggressive way, as the extension system did during the GR era, he felt.
7. Sri Vijay Jawandhia brought up the issue of hybrid cotton and its role in India. He
pointed out that nowhere else in the world are hybrids being used in the name of
productivity. Is the technology going to solve the problem of quality of cotton, he wanted
to know. If there was no hybrid cotton in the country, would Monsanto have brought in Bt
Cotton into the country, he wondered.
8. Dr Ramanjaneyulu pointed out that talking about HRD and capacity building, we cannot
ignore the fact that the profession of agricultural scientists is one that is running on very
low morale. None of the agricultural scientists would want their children in the same
profession, according to him. If that is the situation, how do we bring back morale and
respect in the profession? If people don’t respect their profession, how can they be
drivers of change? Can people who are frustrated be drivers of change – won’t they
transfer it to farmers? How do we address this issue?
9. Mr Shameer from Nellore observed that just as scientists speak only about NPK, farmers
also speak about NPK. Now, with our experience in soil management, can we suggest an
integrated nutrient management package to farmers? Are there local alternatives that
can reduce production cost?
10. Dr Venugopal Rao, a retired professor of entomology pointed out that while we talk
about agricultural research and education system, we are not considering the social
system around it. Given that very low priority is being given to agricultural education, the
human resources that come out of the system would also be of poor quality. We are not
identifying people with the right social perspective. Policy-makers and political leaders
should also be made accountable – when they are in power, they talk of something and
when they come out of power, they talk of farmers and their problems. What is this
conspiracy? Coming to technologies, we in India are supposed to be quite high on
technology achievement index, especially related to agriculture. On the one hand, we
cannot live without a cell phone or a car and other modern amenities. When it comes to
agriculture, we are talking about shunning ‘modern technologies’. Is this logical? Other
problems like land relations and social problems continue and need to be addressed. To
our students we seem to be saying that there is more knowledge in Europe or US about
our agriculture, not in India. How do we change this, he wanted to know.
11. Mr Devinder Sharma observed that on the HRD and capacity building front, the KIA
draws its strength from the existing systems. It is very easy to implement the KIA in this
system. The problem really is at the agricultural extension stage. We should probably
look at it as a blessing in disguise.
12. Ms Usha Jayakumar from Kerala pointed out that in the last five years, admissions into
agricultural universities are steadily declining. This is a major crisis that needs to be
addressed and analysed, she felt.
13. Mr Umendra Dutt spoke about water issues next – societies and from communities
have been delinked from water. They used to have an organic relationship with water as
a resource earlier. In successful examples like Tarun Bharat Sangh, such an organic
relationship was rebuilt. The values that drove the “giving of water” are worth picking up
again. These alternatives are not discussed enough in all their detail. Many of us are not
even aware of Uttaranchal’s Uprihal experience. Civil society is also guilty of not paying
enough attention to such alternatives which are small but successful experiences here
and there. We ourselves have not been paying enough attention to traditional wisdom in
issues like water. We should also critically analyse national water policy wherein water
has been declared a national asset. What does a national asset mean here, something
that you can privatize for the benefit of some companies? There is also another issue
that I want to bring up – the GR advocates congratulate themselves about the nation
having become food self-sufficient. We are not importing any food now, they boast. I
have a question to ask them – have you stopped importing chemical fertilizers from
abroad? All your potash comes from imports – will your food self sufficiency remain if
you stopped the import of these chemicals? You have only replaced the food in the
begging bowl with chemicals – in fact you were getting grains then, now you get poison.
97% of students in Punjab Agriculture University are from non-agriculture background
as per a survey last year. Almost all the senior scientists and technocrats of this university
have joined agri-business companies right after the day of their retirement. If you cannot
produce people who are for farmers, what kind of a system is this? Coming to
indebtedness, it is reported that 23000 crores of rupees is the total debt of farming
households in Punjab. Out of this, 44% is supposed to be borrowing for bringing in farm
inputs. About 13% if for tractors and other long term investments. Even in a small
village, around 30 lakhs of rupees goes out of the village economy in the name of farm
inputs. In bigger villages, it would be more than a crore of rupees. We should look at
such a drain on the farm economy that is happening in the name of modern technologies.

61
The speakers responded to some of the points that the participants raised.

Dr J Venkateswarlu:
• He brought up the issue of Land Grant system because the KIA itself seems to be looking
at this as a continuum, not because he thinks that it is greatly relevant here.
• On options for organic approaches and replacement of NPK – there are bureaucrats who
are coming forward to say that if there is a doable system of putting the inputs being
used for productivity in the hands of farmers, they would do so. Such regenerative
systems can be established within the habitations of farmers quite easily and it is happening
in certain places like the NPM Upscaling example here in Andhra Pradesh. There must be
other platforms in other states like the federated women’s self help groups here in AP
which can provide similar platforms for knowledge transfer and exchange. These can be
utilized for upscaling. As long as the technology is doable, regenerative and attractive
for various reasons, there would be many possibilities for its adoption and spread.
• On productivity in the 80s and now, he pointed out that it is not enough to look at yield
per se but the rate of growth of productivity – that is the central question in any production
system, especially given the population growth rates. From 3.6 in the 1980s it has
decelerated to 1.1% now.
• He clarified that he is not for hybrid cotton either. He brought up the example of public
sector bred hybrids not being available with farmers any more to illustrate his point that
the system spends so much of its resources on technologies that they are ready to leave
to the hands of the companies at the first opportunity. In fact, medium-staple arboreum
cotton should be promoted in the rainfed areas of the country, he felt. The pest problems
on this would not be too high and the medium staple is needed by the industry.
• KIA and NAIP seem to have some similarities and they are probably benefiting from each
other in some ways. NAIP, though there are many teething problems apparent there, is
already on the ground, he pointed out. On public-private partnerships, both projects
seem to have the same understanding.
• On the issue of morale of agriculture scientists being low in general, he felt that the
government should ensure that salaries of agriculture extension workers or agriculture
scientists or doctors or engineers are the same – even in a country like Nepal, that is the
case. Nammalvarji added at this point that the government should also consider these
salaries for farmers.
• During the early days of Green Revolution itself, the Director of the Indian Institute of
Statistics pointed out that this would follow the law of diminishing returns. He said that
we need a system where with the least amount of inputs, yields would be high. However,
his words had been ruthlessly brushed aside. If they were paid heed to, we would not
have the present kind of disaster in agriculture.
• Community approaches in water management as well as bio-mass production are the
only way to go forward. The Catchment Councils in Zimbabwe are a good example for
local decision-making related to resource production, conservation and use. Permission
for various things is sought here not from the government but from the Council.
• What does this mean to the people, really was one of the questions asked. Any intervention
should ultimately lead to livelihood improvements for the local people. That should be
the main parameter of assessment – sustainable livelihoods.

Mr Jacob Nellithanam clarified that he correlated productivity and population growth trends by
presenting the picture of per capita availability and that was the purpose of presenting per capita
availability data in the first instance, to show that it has not improved after GR. With so much
investment going into GR, what have we really achieved, he wondered. Even the quality of food
has deteriorated, he pointed out. In the drylands and many other pockets, the actual availability
for the poor has halved, as many studies are showing now. What we need is accountability for
what has happened so far. Unless we target the real heroes of GR, these things will happen again
and again, he said. The so-called contribution of GR has to be completely analysed and presented
before we can move forward, that is the important point, he added. There is no attempt at all to
appreciate what we have, there is only an attempt to appropriate – that’s been the history so far
and if we keep quiet, it will continue, he felt.

Dr Shambu Prasad, on the question of land grant colleges, pointed out that human resources
and institutional mechanisms do not really get enough thinking. While it is true that the land grant
colleges were very different from our institutions here, they were at least responding to a given
situation. The kind of institutional mechanisms that are present in the KIA in response to the
internal crisis, leave alone the larger farming crisis, are completely inadequate and inappropriate
to address the crisis. He felt that while the health of soils can be revived, the health of the
agricultural research institutions requires much more effort. It is possibly easier to convince
political leaders about what is wrong with the current proposal rather than agricultural scientists,
who are deeply entrenched in their own thinking, with many biases and many of whom have
refused to come to this workshop. The agricultural research institutions in independent India are
the most amazing creation we have, probably one of the most thick-skinned institutions. However,
from the story of SRI (System of Rice Intensification) unfolding in India, it is clear that there are
some very isolated but interesting things happening here and there. Now, these could be the key
to change, he felt.

The day’s deliberations concluded at the end of this session.

63
 DAY 2 – DECEMBER 9TH, 2006
Ms Usha Jayakumar of Thanal welcomed all participants to the
second day of the workshop which included three sessions on
three more Themes of the KIA and a winding up session.

She said that the earlier day gave everyone a broad overview of
the various global and national forces that have shaped the current
farming crisis in India and the possible implications of KIA in such
a situation. The present paradigm of agriculture research and
education – its relevance and political economy were discussed in
the previous day and the implications of such a paradigm were
also clear. A more comprehensive critique of the current research
and education paradigm needs to be evolved. She also hoped that
the day would have some time for participants to discuss how to work on the KIA back in their
respective states. She felt that we need not stick to the framework of the KIA – otherwise, we will
be talking their language, she said.

She introduced the Chairperson and the speakers for the next session on Emerging Technologies
and invited them to come to the podium. She also announced that there will be only two speakers
in the next session as one of the speakers, Dr Raghava Reddy, Director-Research, Acharya N G
Ranga Agricultural University had decided to go to another meeting in Tirupati.
 SESSION 3: Theme 2 of the KIA:

Emerging Technologies, Including Transgenic Agriculture

Sri Vijay Jawandhia, well known farmers’ leader from Shetkari Sanghatan in Wardha
chaired this session on ‘Emerging Technologies including Transgenic Agriculture’. The Chair opened
the session with the sad news that there was police firing the previous day in Yeotmal district
where a farmer lost his life. The farmers were agitating for procurement of their cotton at good
prices by the government and traders. The House paid homage to the farmer’s life before
continuing with the workshop session.

“Transgenic Agriculture – experience so far in India and

implications of the KIA proposals on Indian farmers”

Dr G V Ramanjaneyulu of Centre for Sustainable

Agriculture made the first presentation in this session on
“Transgenic Agriculture – experience so far in India and
implications of the KIA proposals on Indian farmers”. Some
of the main points from his presentation are summed up below:

• Most of our agricultural technologies are borrowed from

elsewhere and thrust down on the farmers. One such classic
example is emerging to be transgenic agriculture. There is
a telugu author who had said that “Men don’t learn lessons
from history – in fact, that is the only lesson we can learn
from history”. That certainly applies for agricultural
technologies. WE have committed some serious mistakes during GR and seem to want to do
so in the ‘second green revolution’ too.
• The great divide between Indian and American agriculture was brought up by many speakers
yesterday. There is another great divide right here that is worth mentioning. On 23rd November
2006, while some of us were observing a day of mourning for the farmers who have committed
suicide in the country, there was another big meeting happening in Delhi. It was a celebratory
meeting discussing Indian agriculture. It was meeting that the industry and the government
have organized to celebrate all the emerging opportunities in Indian agriculture and its second
green revolution.
• In this second green revolution that they talk about, transgenic agriculture is the main driver
like chemicals and HYVs were in the case of the first green revolution. One of the main
questions to be asked about transgenics in agriculture is – whose need is it? If we look at the
production related problems of farmers, there are many safer alternatives to pest management
or disease management. However, it appears that it is not farmers’ problems that are sought
to be addressed with this technology. Such techno-centric solutions were also the hallmark
of GR.
• We need to ask some fundamental questions about the scientificity and predictability of this
technology – GM science believes that all characteristics are governed and controlled by
genes – that we can identify them precisely, copy them, insert them elsewhere and control
them and that in the new organism, you can have the characteristics expressed in a similar
fashion. This is based on the dogma of genetic determinism actually. The same genetic
determinism which explains racism and casteism. Where the belief is that characteristics are

65
 determined by genes, by birth. However, expression of a character is controlled by an internal
environment as well as the external environment. The approach of GE is very reductionist
which believes that few genes can be extracted and inserted elsewhere. Many studies show
that it is not a single gene that controls a character. Presence of gene itself is not expression
of a character. Expression of character is also majorly determined by the external and internal
environment. For instance, Central Institute of Cotton Research in Nagpur published a paper
which says that there is great variability in the expression of Bt toxin amongst various Bt
Cotton hybrids in the country, within different parts of the same plant and within various
points of time in one season.
• Much of the unscientificity of the reductionist approach of transgenic agriculture is not even
questioned and questions if asked are brushed aside. Issues that are unfolding on the ground
as farmers’ experiences is discounted as unscientific! Civil society reports are ignored and no
space for dialogue exists between civil society and the scientific community.
• If we look at the performance of Bt Cotton, the experience has been that where the resources
are good, it has performed well. In those areas, every other crop would have performed well
too. In the resource poor areas, all crops including GM crops have failed. There is a large
scale erratic performance visible on the ground. In the mainstream science, a seed is eligible
for release only if it is uniform and stable. However, Bt Cotton performance over the years,
across seasons and locations has defied this principle repeatedly. In the last few years, a few
hybrids have been withdrawn as non-performing, followed by yet others and introduction of
newer hybrids. It is as though field trials are happening at the expense of farmers, after
commercial cultivation permission has been accorded! They claim that the technology is
successful whereas a few hybrids have failed!
• Then there is the issue of field trials happening all over the country. They are happening all
around us without the farmers, the panchayats and the state governments being told about
them or asked for permission. Investigations into such trials shows that these are trials
which are illegal, unscientific, unreliable and without monitoring. Based on such trials and
data produced by the companies, decisions are being taken by the regulators. When violations
of their own guidelines were pointed out by the civil society, the companies and the regulators
put it down to simple communication gap between various concerned authorities and agencies!
Improvements were promised for the future. This year, similar violations are being discovered
yet again.
• The crops in the pipeline – most research is happening in the public sector in the country.
Right here in Hyderabad, the Directorate of Oilseeds Research is trying to come out with a Bt
Castor variety. Castor does not have major pest problems, to begin with, unlike cotton. Pest
management in castor is fairly easy. Pigeonpea, rice, vegetables etc. – public sector is trying
genetic engineering for all crops for all known pests and diseases!
• Coming to the private sector, after Bt Cotton was allowed in the country all major cotton
producing companies jumped onto the bandwagon and got into agreements with other
companies to come up with their own Bt Cotton hybrids. Now, there are so many companies
across states having many cotton hybrids all having the same gene taken from the same
company and offered to the farmers at an expensive price. This really is a case of monoculture
of genes across varieties and across crops! Is this scientific?
• Regulation of GE crops in India – the biosafety regime is inadequate, the protocols are
questionable – for instance, as part of biosafety testing, in the case of Bt Brinjal, the impact
of the toxin released from the plant on soil microbes was sought to be assessed. For testing
this, they report that soil was taken and fed to the Helicoverpa and because the insects did
not die, the plant’s impacts on soil were considered safe! Such conclusions are drawn on
such tests! What’s worse, nobody questions these protocols. The results of the tests are not
shared with the pubic and not put out for scientific peer review.
• In India, for biosafety testing, companies get to decide their protocols for tests (the above
study is an example) as well as get to do the tests themselves. They spend their money and
get the product tested as per procedures accepted by the Department of Biotechnology. The
companies then walk up to the regulators with their data based on which decisions are taken
- as though they can be expected to report serious problems with their own products. When
there is intense civil society pressure to improve regulation and be transparent in decision-
making, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (an apex decision making body related
to transgenic crops) actually appoints a sub-committee to look into various complaints related
to biosafety, but headed by a GM crop developer! Where can we place our trust, then?
• The current risk assessment system is very narrow. Does not capture medium or long term
impacts or does not go beyond narrow biosafety. For example, coming to Bt Cotton and its
impacts on goats and sheep, it is only interpreted as the impact of Bt toxin directly on the
animal. Toxin per se may not have an effect but the process of insertion of the genes into the
plant could have caused changes in the plant which has now been rendered toxic for the
animal. When reports of experiences of farmers are brought from the field, why are regulators
not ready to investigate and study the phenomenon? Why are they only keen on brushing
these aside? Why are they not looking at things with an open mind – how and why have they
decided that there is no alternative? Such risk assessment is obviously very narrow and does
not pick up any early warnings.
• Early warnings are ignored. A sub-chronic oral toxicity study on goats with Bt Brinjal showed
that there was a significant difference in haemotological parameters between study and
control groups but this was discounted in the conclusions.
• Regulatory failure is also evident in post-release monitoring. State and district level committees
required to be formed under the EPA have still not been formed in places where commercial
cultivation approval has been granted and where field trials are happening. Agricultural
universities are supposed to monitor the performance on the ground. This is unscientific,
narrow and sometimes absent. Reports are often prepared out of visits made to 3-4 sites
that the industry takes them to.
• Decision-making is not transparent, broad-based or participatory. The corporate presence is
apparent everywhere, to the point you would like to ask – ‘who’s regulating whom?’.
• Accountability is a sorely missing component in the GM regulatory regime and its enforcement
that exists in India now. In case of failure, it is not clear who will be held responsible for
payment of compensation to loss-incurring farmers. A few hybrids were withdrawn from the
market after three years on the grounds that they were not performing well. It was obviously
not discovered during the trials. Who is accountable now? While there are cases pending
related to violations in field trials, the regulators went ahead and approved the GM hybrids
for commercial cultivation and these had to be subsequently withdrawn. Who is to be made
accountable here? A clear case of ordering of compensation by the state government is
available here in Andhra Pradesh. When Mahyco’s Bt Cotton failed in Warangal district and
the company was ordered by the government to pay up compensation, they refused! They
not only refused, they moved the High Court accusing the government of harassing them.
These are all issues to be resolved – regulation, accountability, monitoring, transparency,
scientificity, biosafety testing and its adequacy and so on before moving any further on this
technology.
• There are other field level problems – allergies reported by agricultural workers and ginning
factory workers, captured in a study in Madhya Pradesh. However, the study is brushed aside
because data from the US says that Bt Cotton does not cause any health problems. However,
in the US, workers do not pick cotton and therefore, the issue of reporting health problems
does not arise!

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• There are ecological problems arising out of Bt Cotton cultivation – farmers are reporting
from several states that soil productivity seems to be coming down after growing and
harvesting Bt Cotton. They are reporting that subsequent crops are either yielding lower or
are showing stunted growth and are infested with more diseases. There are newer diseases
on cotton. Secondary pests are increasing, as reports from around the world indicate. Bronze
wilt seems to have become a big problem for cotton growers in India and we seem to have
imported it from the US, along with Bt Cotton. Stress intolerance of Bt Cotton is also well-
documented in dryland situations, in rainfed conditions.
• While that is the case with Bt Cotton, there are newer proposals related to regulation. A
national authority for biotechnology is being proposed. Similarly, labelling of GM foods will be
made compulsory. IPR issues are also a very important part of the technology. In fact, it is
IPRs which give exclusive market rights that drive the technology. Monsanto-Mahyco Biotech
which has the exclusive rights over the Bollgard Bt technology has sub-licensed it to many
Indian companies and has so far earned more than 1400 crores as royalty. They had actually
aimed for 4000 crores in 2006-07 but this did not materialize for other reasons – the Andhra
Pradesh government moved the Monopolies & Restrictive Trade Practices [MRTP] Commission
on the seed pricing issue and argued that farmers are losing because of the expensive
nature of the seed and that the Commission should intervene into the monopoly role played
by the company with the proprietary technology. The MRTPC, after its own investigations,
concluded that the company was indulging in restrictive practices and that the trait value
[royalty fees] should be decreased. Monsanto argued that it should be excused from the
case since it is the subsidiary company [MMB] which is into sub-licensing the technology not
Monsanto per se! MMB was arguing that its whole licensing agreement was with individual
seed companies, that it was a private agreement and that the government cannot regulate
it! In this whole issue, it is the Indian seed companies that got caught in a fix – on the one
hand, the government has ordered reduction in the seed price and fixed it uniformly for all Bt
Cotton hybrids and on the other hand, MMB was not relieving companies from their agreements
with the licensor. The seed companies found a way out – they increased the seed rate per
acre [the volume of seed required to be sown per acre – from one packet of 450 gms + 120
gms of non-bt seed to two packets an acre]. The farmers did not get any respite ultimately
on the cost front, truly speaking. This is the case of a proprietary technology which did not
even have a patent in the country. Now, more rigid IPRs are also possible in the country and
the fate of the farmers with such transgenic technologies coupled with IPRs is very predictable.
Such patents already exist on genes, markers, promoters, the technology, on entire plant
species, resting mostly with MNCs like Monsanto!
• Civil society groups, farmers unions, environmental groups, consumer groups and some
scientists are all coming together to oppose transgenic agriculture for a variety of reasons
many of which were illustrated today. Farmers’ groups are resorting to direct action to
prevent contamination from field trials and national trade security being affected. What else
can you expect if regulators don’t act on all the information and records put in front of it,
repeatedly over the years, on routine violations in field trials? It is all very convenient to
argue that farmers should not take law and order into their hands – but who can one place
their trust on, amongst the regulators? How can we stop contamination once it is fait accompli?
Now, more political parties are lending their support to opposition to GM crops and foods.
More and more GM free villages are being declared where farmers, after weighing options,
are choosing to be GM-free. Uttaranchal Chief Minister promised a civil society delegation
that the state will remain GM-Free. Meanwhile, there is a ban on any further field trial
approvals in a Supreme Court PIL on the issue of GMOs.
• It is in this situation that we are looking at a new agreement between India and the US called
KIA, which is placing a lot of emphasis on “emerging technologies” including transgenic
 agriculture. Why should we learn the same technology that should have taught us so many
lessons and should have us invoking the precautionary principle straightaway?
• Let us look at the NARS and how they go after particular technologies. They are always
announcing that if the GM technology is used on public sector varieties, the problems of
farmers will be solved. All these years, they were talking about hybrids and more hybrids.
Today, public sector hybrids are not available for any crops like cotton or vegetables. The
hybrid markets have been taken over by the private seed sector. The same story will get
repeated with the transgenic technology also. They may develop a GM variety and release it
but it will not be accessible to the people. They claim that they will sell the technology to the
private sector after developing the varieties and so on. What is the guarantee that the new
seeds will be made available by the private companies at prices that are affordable and at
prices that are expected out of the public sector? Even otherwise, the agriculture universities
are now getting into one-gene Bt Cotton whereas the private sector has already moved onto
to the 2-gene technology. Even if the public sector releases its own Bt Cotton varieties now,
for example, who are the takers? In one sense, this is about supporting and legalizing bio-
piracy.
• There seems to be an acute dearth of IPR literacy in the public sector in general, leave alone
implications worked out in detail for each project. UAS-Dharwad’s Bt Cotton and Bt Brinjal
development projects (with Rockefeller support for the former and as part of the ABSP II
project for the second) are well known stories now. Genes were brought in and used for
developing new varieties but commercialization is pending for a variety of reasons.
• If NARS does not perform its role in appropriate technology development, at least regulatory
roles are not being performed from all available evidence.
• ICAR’s research orientation is now going to be shifted from applied and adaptive research to
basic and strategic research, as per the KIA. When it is clear that applied research itself had
failed in the Indian agriculture research establishment, what is the rationale behind moving
to basic research? How will they then translate it to farmers’ real needs and conditions on
the ground?
• The Indo-US KIA proposes a variety of changes in agriculture research and education and
some policy measures essentially to tune our model of agriculture that is driven by transgenics.
The major components under Emerging Technologies in KIA are on genomics in crops, animals
and fishes; Molecular Breeding and transgenics. There are proposals for molecular approaches
for plant health, quality assurance, food safety etc.
• The KIA agreement is almost similar to the agreement made between an MNC like Monsanto
and the local seed companies in India in the case of Bt Cotton. An agreement to operationalise
IPRs and the (market) possibility they provide. An agreement that will bypass the policy and
conceptual environment that we had about farmers’ rights, privileges etc.
• There is a real danger of NARS becoming an outsourcing agency – the evidence is already
emerging on this. An outsourcing agency for accessing germplasm in a legal way and to
channelise funds. The NAIP is an example for this. Indian government borrowed money from
the WB where private sector also gets to access funds in the name of Public Private partnership.
It is the tax-payers’ money that is paying for the private sector to secure a larger, legal,
accepted foothold.
• The KIA meetings have expressly talked about creating appropriate policies and laws for
securing and safeguarding proprietary technologies. As for farmers’ rights, what is the fun of
having a technology that cannot be re-used and to give rights too at the same time? The KIA
legitimizes rigid IPR regimes, even though we might be saying that we will not accept patents
and IPRs on plants and so on.
• KIA will erode scientificity to the extent that there will be a breed of scientists who will
religiously believe that transgenics is the only way to go (not a scientific belief but a religious

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 belief), just as the GR developed a breed of scientists who religiously believe that chemicals
are inevitable in agriculture. Such beliefs are not based on scientific evidence. Even scientists
who have not studied transgenics or have worked on it are also willing to readily believe it.

The Chairperson, Mr Vijay Jawandhia had a point to make on the government-sponsored summit
which looked at Emerging Opportunities in Indian Agriculture, that Dr Ramanjaneyulu referred to
in his presentation. In food processing, there is always a talk about value addition – in reality, is
value added or cost added, he wanted to know. In India, is food processing needed? We can
produce fresh vegetables all through the year, for example. What we are being advised to do on
the food processing front is not really in the interests of Indian farmers and would benefit the
technology and machinery manufacturers of Europe and USA, he added. On another point, he
added that hybridization itself should be understood as an enslavement of farmers (if India did
not have cotton hybrids, would Monsanto have ventured into the country with its Bt Cotton, he
wanted to know).
 “Emerging Technologies and IPR Implications”

Dr Bala Ravi, Advisor, Biodiversity in the M S Swaminathan

Research Foundation, Chennai, was the next speaker who made
a presentation on “Emerging Technologies and IPR
Implications”.

He began by saying that holding this workshop was a good

beginning to begin the debate on the KIA albeit a bit late. He
also felt that this process will not be sufficient for sensitization
of people involved about the implications of the KIA and that
multiple approaches have to be followed, including media
intervention. The following are the main points he made, divided
into two sections – what is the IPR regime related to agriculture
that exists in the country today and two, what are the implications flowing out of the KIA.

• In our country, we did not have any patent regime for a long time. During the British rule of
the country, the colonial powers introduced their own law in India. After independence, we
had our own laws to govern IPR issues like the Copyright Act and the Patents Act of 1970. At
that time, the law said that any method in agriculture or horticulture is not patentable. Any
processes for treatment of plants and animals for rendering them free of pests and diseases
were also not patentable at that time. No life forms were patentable as per this Act. As per
this version of the Act, the period for patents was seven years for chemical processes. And
then, India went to sign international agreements like TRIPS [Trade Related Intellectual
Property Rights].
• TRIPS identified eight different kinds of IPRs. Patents shall be made available to all inventions
whether for products or processes in all fields of science and technology (agriculture is also
a field of S&T), as per TRIPS. Under TRIPS, for agriculture, patents and Geographical
Indications are important. All developing countries have been given ten years from 1995 in
which to make their domestic laws compliant with the treaty. The first phase of five years
ended by 1999. The second phase ended by end of 2004. WE are right now in the TRIPS
regime with our own laws changed and modified to make them TRIPS-compliant. A first
amendment to the Patents Act was made in 1999 followed by a second amendment in 2002
and a third one in 2005. India enacted the Plant Varieties Protection & Farmers’ Rights Act in
2001 to make use of the sui generis clause of TRIPS.
• A Patent is a legal grant by the State to an inventor allowing right to exclude others from
making, using, exercising and marketing his/her invention within a geographic territory for a
stipulated period of time in lieu of disclosing the invention in a patent specification. You can
license the invention out or sell it for a royalty and so on after obtaining a patent. You can
deal with it as you would with moveable property.
• The three essential requirements of a patentable invention are Novelty (that something is
not known to the world till that date), Inventiveness and Industrial Utility. Some important
features of a patent include the fact that there is nothing like an international patent and
each patent has to be obtained in a given country (once something is patented somewhere,
you cannot copy it and try and obtain a patent elsewhere because it loses its novelty). A
patent established in one country is not automatically applicable in other countries. However,
extension of a patent from the country where it is first established to other countries can
happen within 12 months. A patent automatically lapses after 20 years and also lapses when

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 renewal fee is not paid. Further, a patent can be challenged any time from its grant/
establishment to its expiry.
• In the Indian Patents Act of 2005, after the last set of amendments have been made, the
following are the exemptions: Any methods in agriculture and horticulture are not patentable.
An invention, which in effect is traditional knowledge or which is an aggregation or duplication
of known properties of traditionally known components is not patentable. Plants and animals
are not patentable in whole or any part thereof, except for micro-organisms. Such non-
patentability applies to seeds, varieties, species and essentially biological processes for
production and propagation of plants and animals (normal, natural process of reproduction).
Discovery of any living things occurring in nature is also not patentable [even the patentability
of micro-organisms requires that they be improved or modified but not be patented as taken
from Nature].
• Patents are however allowed on chemical, bio-chemical, biotechnological and food processes;
on products arising out of the above processes except for the exemptions mentioned above;
on microbiological processes and products thereof as per the 2005 Act. Product patents
allowed now in India will have implications for stronger monopolies building up on several
fronts including in the pharma sector.
• Patent Act 2005 also has a Disclosure requirement which means that the source and
geographical origin of the material mentioned in the patent application is required to be
disclosed. Further, the subject matter material has to be deposited in an international repository
authority under the Budapest Treaty [India joined the Treaty in 2003].
• It is also important to understand the differences between India’s patent regime and the
regime that exists elsewhere, especially the US of A. There are many countries which have
gone above the de minimis requirements of the TRIPS. In the USA, it is said that everything
under the Sun can be patented. New plants and animals which are even naturally occurring
are patentable in the US. There are instances of plants not known to America being carried
there and patented there. Biotechnological products such as transgenics or other genetically
engineered plants and animals are patentable there. Components of life forms like cell lines,
tissues, organs of plants and animals including human beings are patentable in the USA.
Genomes and gene sequences of plants and animals are also patentable.
• Comparison of the patent regimes between India and America shows glaring differences.
While plants and animals are patentable in the US, they are not in India. On plant varieties,
USA grants patents while India has a sui generic system of allowing Plant Breeder Rights (in
addition to rights to researchers and farmers). Our patent regime is generally what is minimally
required under TRIPS obligations. India has a Plant Varieties Protection & Farmers’ Rights
Act as the sui generis law. Plant Breeders Rights are the main IPRs provided under this, even
as Farmers’ Rights are also included. These Farmers’ Rights are not only about use, re-use,
save, sow and exchange registered varieties but an express provision to register farmers’
varieties also. Researchers’ rights are also provided for on registered varieties in this Act. In
other countries, there is only Researchers’ Privilege.
• India also has a Geographical Indications Act, enacted in 1999. This is to preserve the distinction
of identify of particular products, those products which can be conceived in the mind just by
the mention of the name. This is an attributable association between a given quality, reputation
and other qualities of a product and its origin or production or act of processing or preparation
in a definable territory. Often times, these are traditional varieties developed by communities
and grown by them in particular parts of the country and a reputation associated with such
varieties or products. Examples of GI in India are Darjeeling tea, basmati rice, Mysore silk
etc. This is an IPR that is not transferable. The community gets a collective IPR as custodians.
Subject matter IPR Regime in USA IPR Regime in India
Plants including transgenics Patentable Not patentable
Animals including transgenics Patentable Not patentable
Plant varieties Patentable Sui generic
Organs, tissue or cell lines of plants & animals Patentable Not patentable
Gene sequences of plants or animals Patentable Not patentable
Expressed Sequence Tags Patentable Not patentable
Single nucleotide polymorphism Patentable Not patentable
Collective IPR under GI Not allowed Allowed

• Biopiracy as a phenomenon has increased in recent times – since the 1990s, after patenting
of life forms has been allowed. Advances in biotechnology are also another reason for
increased bio-piracy. You can take one leaf of a plant from one country to the other, extract
the DNA and patent a gene there. Out of the 2 lakh patents that have been established the
world over on genetic material, the share of developing countries is 6%. Five corporate
biotech giants, including Monsanto, own more than 75% of proprietary biotechnologies. Our
earlier fights over bio-piracy related to neem, basmati and turmeric have also shown us that
some of these could be fought, but at a huge cost – very often, this is not affordable.
• Now, there are attempts to document traditional knowledge to determine novelty and to
counter bio-piracy. It is said that this will prevent bio-piracy and not just countering a patent
after it is established. Traditional Knowledge Digital Libraries are being set up and the Biological
Diversity Act talks about establishing people’s biodiversity registers. A relevant counterpoint
is that such ready documentation actually allows for more bio-piracy. 35000 ayurvedic
preparations are supposed to have been documented so far under TKDL.
• The Biological Diversity Act defines all forms of biodiversity in the country as the sovereign
property of India. Under this a National Biodiversity Authority has been set up to ensure that
no foreigner has access to any biological resource or knowledge associated therewith, occurring
within the country for research, or commercial utilization or bio-surveys or bio-utilisation
without the consent of the Authority. The Act further says that prior approval by the NBA is
mandatory for applying for establishing any IPR based on Indian biodiversity or traditional
knowledge, with an exception to plant varieties however.
• Coming specifically to the KIA and IPR implications, it should be recognized that the deal
provides for great R & D and innovation potential in at least four areas of the KIA – agri-
processing and marketing; biotechnology; water management and about a dozen niche areas
identified. There is also a huge transfer of crop, animal and fish genetic resources involved
in the Theme that covers Biotechnology.
• The Biotechnology collaborative research involves pigeonpea genomics, cDNA [chromosomal
DNA libraries], QTLs, allele mining, genes concerned to resistance to biotic and abiotic factors,
genomics of buffalo and goats, cell and stem cell lines of these animals, Indian finfish species
and the genetic diversity there and so on. Much of this diversity has been generated and
nourished by our farmers to suit different growing conditions and our material is rich in
resistance to many biotic and abiotic stresses because of such selection and maintenance of
diversity. All these material is now going to be shared amongst concerned American Universities
and private laboratories.
• Such transfer of huge and very important genetic material is happening without specific
Material Transfer Agreements in place. There is no mention at all in the KIA document about
such MTAs. There is a high danger of eventual use of these materials by US public and
private sector research bodies for creation of patents. Further, the USA has not ratified the
Convention on Biological Diversity and does not recognize the sovereign rights of other countries
over their biological resources. Material is already being taken from here by scientists and

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 after the research is over, it is not as though everything can be brought back. You can’t
destroy everything that has been studied and created in the research. You end up leaving
some material as well as lot of data. Genomics of pigeonpea for instance cannot be done by
taking just one variety from here.
• It is obvious that the biotechnology research is likely to generate innovations patentable in
the USA. The KIA document is however silent on potential ownership. Absence of MTAs
creates more dangers. KIA is also silent about the third party use of material after the
research project period.
• What is also relevant to note is the fact that India has fair human and institutional capacity to
conduct its own research in all the areas shortlisted in the KIA, especially on the biotechnology
front. Rice genomic sequencing that we did as part of an international project is a good
example to show that we have the capacities to take up such research right here in the
country. DBT is being increasingly strengthened to take up research on almost all these
topics listed in the KIA – we have nearly 55 centres of excellence recognized by the Department
of biotechnology. There is no dearth of excellent laboratories or human capacities in the
country on many of these areas, within the public sector itself, provided network approach is
taken. There is no need to give so much material to our scientists and send them abroad and
learn from the Americans. Simple training and upgrading the skills of Indian scientists is
understandable. However, the transfer of Indian resources in the name of joint research,
without an MTA is a dangerous thing that is happening. Joint patents in such partnerships
mean that sub-licensing can happen from one party to a third party without the partner in the
patent being informed about it. In the US, the private sector has a strong hold over the
research, unlike here in India. Even Universities do most of their research for private
companies. The public sector bodies also sell their research to private companies.

The KIA document seems to have been put together in a great hurry. There are many
inconsistencies within the proposal – for example, 14 universities from the US are supposed to
be collaborating on this deal. However, just the biotechnology section lists out 19 such universities
including one private company. Further, the proposals for research under ‘emerging technologies’
seem to be a collection of various ongoing research projects that are already happening in India.
Like buffalo genomics undertaken by the IVRI.

Given all the above, the KIA on biotechnology with transfer of Indian biodiversity is a strategic
blunder, Dr Bala Ravi concluded.

Before the discussions began, Ms Kavitha Kuruganti from CSA requested the participants not to
go into their stand on IPRs in agriculture (just presume that most people in the workshop are
against it at the philosophical, conceptual and practical levels) and kindly focus the discussions
on how we counter the KIA and its IPR implications. Mr Vijay Jawandhia added that if we ensure
straight line varieties for all crops for farmers, no IPR law is going to affect farmers. If such
seeds are available, this discussion on IPRs may not be necessary at all, he said. While seed
prices are constantly increasing as we shift from varieties to hybrids to GM hybrids, the market
price of output is falling for farmers.

DISCUSSIONS AFTER THE PRESENTATIONS ON THEME 2 OF THE KIA

• Mr Sreedhar from Thanal pointed out that Dr Bala Ravi’s presentation raised some serious
lacunae and questions with serious implications, flowing out of the KIA. In short, this is
regarding the sovereignty of the nation and the need to protect our resources at whatever
cost. Have these questions and concerns been raised in any official forum either in the
 formulation of the KIA or in the past one year of implementation, he wanted to know. He felt
that this is of particular interest given that an NGO like MSSRF works with the government,
unlike many other organizations which are fighting the government from outside. He added
that Dr Bala Ravi’s presentation shows that the KIA is a clear case of robbery under the
leadership of the present government. He wanted to know from Dr Bala Ravi what legal
options and what political options exist for civil society to counter what is happening. Dr Uma
Shankari asked a related question on whether the MSSRF backs Dr Ravi’s anxieties about the
deal. Mr Debjeet Sarangi repeated the question by asking what MSSRF’s stand on the deal
was, given that Dr Swaminathan is also the Honorary Advisor to the Board of the KIA.
• Dr Shambu Prasad had a question related to technological determinism. The earlier day,
there was a comment about atomic science moving ahead despite resistance from people
including atomic scientists on a variety of grounds. He felt that there is a parallel here in
agriculture with transgenic science and technological determinism. One side of the coin
could be the conspiracy part, but the other side is the belief of scientists with institutional
reward mechanisms built around such technological determinism. How do we respond to
this huge technological determinism mindset? He also referred to Dr Bala Ravi’s reminder to
everyone that the USA is not a signatory to the CBD. On the nuclear deal, the US is able to put
pressure on us to sign the NPT but nowhere is India saying that the US should sign the CBD.
Why are we as a country unable to ask this of the USA? Should we ask our parliamentarians
and others to raise this as an issue?
• Dr M S Chari wanted to know why there were differences in the royalties charged, from
country to country, as the case of ‘Bollgard’ Bt Cotton illustrates. He also referred to the
origin of illegal Bt Cotton in the country. Breeders from public sector are moving out to join
private companies and are coming with new lines and varieties without following any legal
procedures laid down. It is as though they have just dreamt about which variety exists where
and picked it up to make crossing and to come up with new hybrids. It is also claimed later
on by the company that they do not know how the Bt ended up in the plant, because they
were undertaking pure line selection. How can this be allowed in our country?
• Mr Dharmendar Malik of BKU observed that farmers are not being given what they are
asking for [good market prices for their produce, for instance], whereas things that were not
asked for are being imposed upon them forcibly [IPRs]. It seems as though this is a method
to criminalize farmers and penalize them, more than anything else.
• Mr Udaya Shankar wanted to know whether there was involvement of Department of
Biotechnology or institutions like CCMB when the KIA was formulated given that it is an inter-
disciplinary programme. What are the procedures and processes that are followed in arriving
at such bilateral agreements, he wanted to know.
• Ms Usha pointed out that regulation for many reasons does not work, does not happen in
our country. Whether it is related to a technology or whether it is related to IPR regime.
Taking the example of Kani Tribes, she pointed out that things like benefit-sharing have
actually divided the community into two factions. We will end up doing that with Geographical
Indications and other IPRs too. Instead of this, why can’t we think of ways to protect our
resources and knowledge at the national level as a sovereign right?
• Dr Uma Shankari wanted to know whether we cannot have a non-monetised system of
recognizing innovations in an IPR system. If we have a system like that, we can invite people
to come and do collaborative research and only the genuinely interested will come to us, she
argued.
• A participant from Chittoor (who is also a Planning Commission working group member
related to horticulture) summed up Dr Ramanjaneyulu’s presentation as his arguments on
why we don’t need the technology and another set of arguments on how regulatory systems
are failing. He wanted to know whether we have the kind of power that it takes to say no,

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 based on this. Should we fighting this KIA which is after all only a 116-crore-a-year, small
project, compared to the thousands of crores of rupees we are spending on other things and
even wasting? He felt that NGO representatives go here and there and acquire some knowledge
and keep saying No to various things. As I farmer, I don’t care if the urban consumer dies
because of a technology I adopt, he said; in the first instance, it is the urban people who
taught the farmers all the hazardous technologies. Now that their health is badly affected
with chemicals in food and food production, they are talking about how farmers should shift
to biotechnology, he observed. Most NGOs are not asking farmers what they want but are
only concerned about what they are advocating for from an ideological perspective.
• Ms Kavitha Kuruganti reiterated her earlier point about the two levels at which the IPRs in
agriculture issue plays out. Saying No to IPRs in agriculture is something that has already
been stated by most groups, she felt. At another level are implications flowing out of the KIA.
She asked the participants whether we can bring the discussion to strategies of countering
rather than just on stands related to IPRs.
• Another participant also wanted the workshop to first clarify our own role and what we need
to do from tomorrow to counter the KIA and its implications. What should we do and what do
we want others to do, he asked. Since the agreement is silent on some crucial aspects, what
has to be done now, who has to do it, how etc., he wanted to know from Dr Bala Ravi.
• Mr Shaik Anwar wanted to know from Dr Bala Ravi whether the legal space does not seem
to be contradictory between the KIA and the PVPFR.

Dr Bala Ravi’s responses to the points raised by the participants:

• MSSRF is an NGO and its footing is like any other NGO. Dr Swaminathan as an individual is
however being asked by the government to be involved in various projects, discussions,
working groups etc., as an Advisor or a Chairperson and so on. That is in his personal
capacity and it has nothing to do with MSSRF, the NGO. He is the Chairperson of the Governing
Board of the MSSRF, true. He accepts various roles that could be convenient to him if
governments and other national, international and other agencies ask him to. For example,
he is advisor to the West Bengal government, to Rajasthan government and so on. On the
other hand, we [about 200 staff members] at the Foundation work on several programmes
and projects like any other NGO. He also said that no one from the Foundation has been
involved in any official discussions on the KIA as per his knowledge. “I have no comment on
whether he has accepted an Honorary Advisor position on the KIA in his personal capacity. I
did not know that he was an Honorary Advisor to the KIA until I came here, in fact. I did not
go to the internet to check more on the KIA but mostly went with the material the organizers
had sent me as the KIA proposal”, he added. “I am here speaking on my behalf, as an
individual who has expertise in this area”.
• Coming to the legal and political ways in which the KIA [especially on the IPR front] can be
countered, he had a few points to make. Parliamentarians, state legislators (especially given
that Agriculture is also a state subject) etc. can be approached. States can move on their
own depending on whether they [are made to] understand the gravity of the situation. In any
case, biodiversity is a state subject too - the Central government does not own any biodiversity
– finally, biodiversity belongs to the state and the panchayats. State governments can move
on this in an appropriate manner, he said. Similarly, parliamentarians can be sensitized to
move on this issue if civil society can give a factual briefing to them. Legal recourse is always
possible – we can move a court asking how the KIA can move forward when we have a
Biological Diversity Act in the country without MTAs and without the consent of the NBA.
• The very purpose of any IPR is to give an exclusivity in commercial gain – therefore, having
a law in India that has non-monetised IPRs is not possible. Whatever the IPR is, it finally boils
 down to the financial benefit. Our present IPR system has come as a consequence of our
joining the WTO and the requirement of TRIPS. The amendments made to our Patents Act
was incremental to meet the requirements of the TRIPS. Each time, there was resistance
and hue and cry raised. The parliament rejected the amendments twice in fact and a Joint
Parliamentary Committee was also set up. The Act in its present stage is there with considerable
public-state interaction only. If we raise enough public opinion, we can certainly change the
law – that recourse is always open of course.
• On NPT and CBD and USA’s stand on these treaties, he explained that it is your clout in the
international community that finally matters on whether you can get another country to sign
on the NPT while you yourself would not sign on the CBD. Even if the media thinks that we
are equal partners, it is not so in reality. He reiterated the point he made in his presentation
that many of the areas of collaboration are not warranted in the first instance.
• On differential royalties being charged in different countries: the Bt gene is not patentable as
per the Indian law. Public sector bodies like CICR can easily develop their own Bt Cotton
varieties since the Bt gene is in the public domain. As we know, Gujarat farmers are developing
their own Bt cotton varieties. Why could not ICAR develop its Bt Cotton varieties? A senior
technocrat responded to this by saying that he does not have the support of his superiors.
Well, all business people have their business morality and protocols. Although there is no
law, they do not want to displease a business opponent. These royalties are charged mostly
based on the market value and not because of laws that have been applied. The market
value can be different for the same product in different contexts. In China, the Chinese
Academy of Sciences had developed its own Bt gene and their own Bt Cotton crop. This, they
started selling at a very low price. If that is the case with the public sector selling seeds at a
very low price, the private sector cannot sell at a high price. They had to cut down their
royalty. Kavitha added to Dr Bala Ravi’s point and said that royalty fixation was preceded by
market surveys that assessed WTP [Willingness to Pay] by farmers and was based on the
results of such surveys.
• Responding to the fact that the government seems to be giving things to farmers that they
are not asking for, while denying what they are asking for, he said that the PVPFR went
through a process of consultations and discussions with many farmers’ organizations. It was
first mooted in 1993 when P V Narsimha Rao was the Prime Minister and went through the
Parliament and its Joint Parliamentary Committee when the Rajya Sabha rejected the then
Bill. In 2001, the Parliament passed the Act after the JPC went state to state consulting
various stakeholders. To say that this Act is not receiving public support is a disagreeable
matter, he argued. “Our democracy has been functioning like that and if any activism is
required, it has to be done at the right time. If civil society activism does not happen at the
right time, you know that to re-do the law the effort required is manifold”, he pointed out.
• Were the DBT and other stakeholders involved while formulating the DBT? Dr Ravi said that
he was not familiar with the process adopted and cannot answer this.
• In terms of roles to be played, he felt that this workshop should bring out the details of what
is objectionable about this deal in a priority order and create awareness about it in the public
in general but policy makers in particular. We can consult legal experts on the possibility of
getting a stay on this, he said. Even though this is supposed to be a collaborative research,
the proposal only talks about the money that the government of India is putting in, not what
the US government will put in. It is not clear what the USDA is going to do and what is its
role. Despite such confusion, it is reported that scientists from here have begun going to the
US, with materials and that the research has begun, especially under the Borlaug fellowships.

Dr Ramanjaneyulu’s responses to the discussion points raised:

77
 • Agricultural research establishment cannot seem to get out of a mindset that they have
of promoting techno-centric, input-centric models. How do we make the establishment
accountable for the technologies that they generate and promote in itself should take
care of how do we get them out of this mould.
• On consultation processes that have been adopted for the KIA formulation, there seem
to be no such processes, from the information we collected from within the ICAR. It
seems to be a top-down approach. Somebody has decided somewhere that this is the
way to go and it is just passed down. There are so many unresolved issues related to
technologies and ramifications, IPRs, priority themes for research etc. In the SAU of
Andhra Pradesh, from the day George Bush visited the campus to this day, several senior
scientists and officials have been visiting the USA but there is no clarity about what is
happening.
• To Mr Narayana Reddy’s point on urban consumers now dictating technologies that
farmers should adopt, Dr Ramanjaneyulu clarified that CSA is not looking at the issue
from a consumer perspective – that the beginning point is the farmers and their livelihoods,
their reality. In the case of Bt Cotton also, it is the farmers who are facing the problem.
If there is really a technology that helps farmers and upholds farmers’ rights, we are not
going to resist it, he said. However, we are trying to foresee from the experiences that
we have had with GR technologies earlier, the Bt Cotton and GM regulation so far and
evidences from elsewhere. Our understanding on GE issues flows from that and our
analysis shows clearly that this is not for farmers and their benefit, he said. He also
pointed out that like in the case of GR, we cannot afford to take up only post-mortem
exercises on it, especially in the case of GE by allowing it to come in only to discover
foreseeable problems sooner or later. We need a meaningful dialogue based on the
evidence and arguments we are presenting. It is not wise to just attribute some motives
to us, he pointed out.
• It is also worth noting that the establishment is not bothering anymore about facts and
empirical evidence – the situation also seems to be beyond law and regulation. The seed
pricing issue that the AP government is fighting is a good example for this in a country
which has technically no patents on genes. And when laws of both countries apply, the
issue becomes much more complicated. We cannot walk into this blindly given such
complications.
• The most important question according to him was, how can we believe that farmers
will benefit out of all the transgenic research that the public sector is planning to take up
under the KIA if the past twenty five years of research on hybrids has not materialized
only in small set of farmers adopting the public sector releases. Unless we change the
systems that exist, you may come out with any technology, but it may not reach the
farmers. You may develop a variety, you may release it, the scientist might get a patent
and even a promotion but this does not necessarily mean that farmers benefit out of it.

Mr Vijay Jawandhia concluded the session with a few remarks from the Chair. 65% of Indians are
farmers and they are the ones voting governments into power mostly. And it is the farmers who
are committing suicides. Soon, whole families have to commit suicides. According to our
Constitution, Agriculture is a state subject. However, all major decisions related to agriculture
have been kept with the central government. How do we stir up the politics of this, especially with
the regional parties which are getting stronger in the country than ever before? If can change the
politics of this country, there is hope that human beings in this country will get to live with human
dignity. Until then, there is no hope, he added.
 SESSION 4: Theme 3 of KIA:

Agri-Processing & Marketing: “Food Processing,

Byproduct Utilisation and Biofuels”

Dr A Prasada Rao, Agriculture Scientist and State Committee member of AP Rythu Sangam
chaired this session with two speakers. Even in this session, Prof Haq, Chairperson of Commission
for Agricultural Costs and Prices [CACP] who was scheduled to speak on the KIA implications on
farmers on the agri-marketing front could not attend the workshop and dropped out at the last
minute.

The Chairperson reminded everyone that the reality of the day seems to be that policies are
made in favour of globalization. Globalisation is an agenda being pursued single-mindedly,
unmindful of consequences to people in developing countries and spurred by finance capital. The
core process of globalization is also virtualization whereby the reality is camouflaged – unreal
things are projected as real in this process, according to him. When we analyse something, we
should not get carried away by what is written there, he said. What is not written there is equally,
if not more, important. Right from the Dunkel debate time, we have been promised many things.
The reality today is very contrary to what has been promised. Many of us seem to be more
concerned about the outcomes of globalization rather than getting engaged in the processes.
The same applies for KIA and we need to understand the process of its formulation, he felt.

Coming to agricultural institutions, though there is apparent freedom to work, there is really no
freedom to decide. This applies at the national level too, when it comes to concepts like sovereignty.
Technically, the parliament can decide on issues like IPRs but are we really able to decide, he
wondered.

He said that with the KIA, the agriculture research and education agenda in the country is being
hijacked exclusively to support the corporate interests of America. This is a trend that had always
been there but with KIA, this is acquiring formal institutionalization. It is unfortunate that other
than a few media opinion pieces here and there, the Parliament has not debated this bilateral
agreement in all its details.

The agri-processing sector is also being projected as the one which will generate more income
as well as ‘accommodate’ the people who will get displaced from agriculture – this is evidence
that an exit policy is clearly being advocated by the policy in the country. This is really about
dispossessing our farmers, he said.

Nearly 4000 crores have been spent on agro-industry and several special agri-export zones have
been set up in the country. In AP alone, there are more than six such zones. What has happened
to all this investment is a question to be asked.

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 “Biofuels Vs Food: KIA Proposals and Implications for Indian
farmers”

Mr Ananthapadmanabhan , Executive Director,

Greenpeace India spoke first about “Biofuels Vs Food: KIA
Proposals and Implications for Indian farmers”. He
observed that the absence of anyone from the official side is
unfortunate and that civil society groups seem to be talking
amongst themselves on most of these issues than being able to
engage the ‘other side’ in any meaningful way. Most of the
important points he made are summed up below:

• The key issues related to proposals on bio-fuels are

whether this would mean a new competition for land
and its use, why is bio-fuels part of the KIA, what is the
larger geo-political framework in which bio-fuels are being promoted, what are the
implications for farmers, especially small and marginal farmers and so on.
• Bio-fuels and particularly bio-diesel is being eulogized by people whom we thought would
never be interested in farmers. Firodia, Chairman of Kinetic spoke about how bio-diesel
would change the lives of millions of farmers in the country, for instance. There seems
to be an expectation that this could revolutionise the lives of millions of farmers. Is that
really going to happen is a question to be answered. Rudolph Diesel had predicted long
back that the future of mankind is diesel engines run on vegetable oils. He said it before
the turn of the last century. In a sense, there is nothing new about bio-fuels and bio-
diesel.
• What is new is Climate Change that is driving a lot of thinking around this subject across
the world. There is a specific directive in the European Union for buying a certain
percentage of their entire fuel consumption from bio-fuels. So, there is a market out
there which is a big market. Then there is the energy security situation. More and more
countries are worried about the Middle East, what is going on there and the source of
oil. It is not really a worry about running out of oil but a worry related to access in a
stable and acceptable way. A third driver seems to be this thinking that bio-fuel will allow
you to leave the rest of our consumption patterns in tact [without having to make
fundamental shifts in lifestyles and consumption patterns] and instead of burning oil, we
can burn jatropha oil. These are the things that are driving this push for bio-fuels.
• There are some very basic questions that are to be resolved (questions that you would
ask in the case of any new use) – if we are growing bio-fuels, where should they be
grown? Theoretically, it could be grown on existing agricultural lands or on lands that
are converted from natural eco-systems [as in the case of Latin America where there is
a rampant expansion into natural eco-systems]. The favourite answer in India seems to
be “wastelands” – not a very useful term.
• In addition to where will the bio-fuels be grown, what will be grown is a question too.
One approach seems to be to produce a different product from the existing crops – for
example, not sugar from sugarcane but ethanol as Brazil did when sugar prices crashed
some time back. Another approach seems to be to mainstream or create a new crop
which will be popular like Jatropha or Pongamia. Crops that are currently marginal but
could become the fuel of the future. A third stream which is much further from
commercialization as of now is that of producing ethanol from coarser plant material or
cellulosic plant material and from byproducts. This is a dream being pursued by the
 National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the US for a long time and India seems to be
want to be there along with them.
• Another pertinent question to be resolved is the one related to who will grow and produce
bio-fuels. There seem to be three models being talked about right now. One model
seems to be to leave it to the existing patterns of ownership to produce the bio-fuel crop
without specifically working out the question. It is assumed here that somehow it will be
produced by someone, given the right market conditions. There are also others who are
wondering if an equivalent to Amul (for milk) cannot be had with bio-fuels too – this is of
basically organizing farmers into cooperatives and setting up a whole production system
to replicate the successful model of Amul. A third model seems to be to leave it to large
corporations to do this through contract farming.
• Another relevant question to be asked is how these bio-fuels will be produced. Is this
going to be low-input sustainable farming or high-input intensive farming? Or will this
even be GE?
• All these above questions have to be carefully debated and answered before we move
further because leaving it to free markets is not going to be the answer. Markets are not
going to regulate this – we cannot afford to say that we don’t need to do anything about
this arguing that ultimately, some land will be converted to biofuels (where farmers get
remunerative returns from biofuels) and some land with remain for food production
(because certain food crops will always have their value or because some farmers don’t
find bio-fuels remunerative…). ‘Leaving it to the invisible hand’ [of markets] is simply not
going to work. There are many reasons for this. For example, the buying power of
European car is far higher than that of an Indian leave alone a poor Indian. If we potentially
have the same crop that could provide food as well as fuel, it is very clear where the
markets will drive it. If we are producing food and feedstock and the food itself is the
feedstock for biofuels, then the two prices will get tied together inexorably. An IFPRI
study tries to look at this phenomenon in various possible scenarios and finds that in all
scenarios, food prices getting tied up to fuel prices is an inevitable consequence. From
Greenpeace, there is also this concern of natural habitats being invaded if this is left to
market forces because this push for bio-fuels is essentially saying that we can produce
all the fuel that we need on the surface of the earth instead of mining it from under. It is
certainly calling for an expansion into natural habitats left on this planet.
• Therefore, there are some policy choices to be made. Intellectually, the desirable policy
choice is quite obvious and does not require too much thinking. It should obviously be
marginal crops or byproducts on marginal lands grown sustainably by cooperatives. The
biggest caveat is that you cannot produce bio-fuels or for that matter anything, to meet
unsustainable consumption patterns, of course. This caveat is a much larger question
related not to just to Bio-fuels or the KIA. Assuming that that caveat is in place, the talk
that has been going around in India so far seems to be a good way to go – for example,
the railways using their existing wastelands to grow Jatropha to produce bio-diesel to
run their own fleet. On top of that, if we can organize the production around cooperatives,
that might be a way forward. However, that is not going to happen.
• The reality is that there is really no way by which we can decide what lands will grow
what without interfering with the legitimate choices of farmers. Remember, it is already
coming up in the case of GE when you point out it is not a good technology – they usually
respond by saying that the farmers want it! There are powerful vested interests in this
area and one can see them lining up already. Ones who would like to make and sell
ethanol, ones who would like to sell bio-diesel, ones who would like to sell more bikes
and ones who would like to sell cars. There are also vested interests of another kind –
the ones who worry about climate change and would like to stop it at any cost. All of this

81
 in a context of a globalised market which exists out there and which will drive this whole
thing in its own way. Therefore, coming up with a policy formulation that says Jatropha
grown only on marginal lands may not mean anything in reality.
• Coming to the KIA proposals on the subject specifically, there seem to be two proposals
related to technology of bio-fuel making. One is to convert mainstream crops – improve
the conversion or reduce the cost of conversion; two is to convert by-products like woody
mass into liquid fuels through bio-chemical processes. It does not seem to focus on bio-
diesels at all. This is particularly interesting given that the dominant discourse around
bio-fuels in India has always centred around bio-diesel on wastelands. Non-edible oils
esterified into bio-diesels which will be blended in the fuels for our cars and so on – that
has been the way bio-fuels have always been articulated in this country as the dominant
discourse. However, the KIA’s proposing something different.
• Some concerns – The current formulation of how and why of bio-diesels in the dominant
discourse is intellectually difficult to find fault with – environment saved along with poor
farmers and their wastelands saved. However, if this is the direction in which the Indian
agricultural establishment is thinking about bio-fuels, it seems like little more than a way
of managing opposition. It is difficult to oppose growing biofuels on marginal lands than
opposing conversion of sugarcane to ethanol where there are stronger grounds for
opposition – especially diverting from food production to grow fuel. While that is the
framing of bio-fuels in India, the agenda seems to be something else. The real intent
seems to be to focus on sugarcane to ethanol and find a second market for sugar given
the powerful interests that are behind sugarcane production in the country. There is no
real intent to bar food land to fuel crop production from all evidence. There is no interest
in stopping it nor is there any concern about such trends. Taken together, all of this is
about establishing corporate control over the entire supply chain [mainly through contract
farming].
• The situation also seems to be a bit of a lost opportunity – opportunity to address the
real issues of sustainable consumption [in all fairness, the KIA on agriculture could not
have addressed this question of sustainable consumption by itself]. There is also an
opportunity lost in terms of looking at by products as biomass for inputs for organic
farming. A third opportunity was that of communities at the local level using non-edible
vegetable oils to meet community level energy requirements. There is a fair amount of
experience, interest and enthusiasm for that kind of work all over India. However, the
mainstream KIA proposals are not covering any part of this and are just bypassing such
opportunities and looking at completely different things.
 “Implications of KIA proposals on farmers in the sphere of
Marketing”

Dr Vadde Sobhanadeeswar Rao, former Minister for Agriculture, Government of

Andhra Pradesh spoke next on “Implications of KIA proposals on farmers in the sphere of
Marketing”. The following is the transcription of most of his presentation.

“I will briefly touch upon agro processing and marketing. At the

outset, let me express my deep apprehensions about the events
to come. In the KIA (Board), there are 3 MNC representatives
from US and one from India included. Obviously, they will
influence the course of events and the government policy decisions
including legislative regime also. The Farmers’ Rights in the
PPVFR have been incorporated after a long struggle. Lots of
discussions happened all over the country. Farmers’
organizations, scientists, NGOs and others played a role. After
this, the farmers’ rights have been put in black and white through
our PPVFR Act. The new Seeds Bill is yet to be passed by the
Parliament. The old Seeds Act has been in place from the time
the public sector began its work on the seeds front. Then the role of the private sector was very
minimal. In the changed scenario, private sector is playing a considerable part in seed production
and marketing. In this situation, the presence of Monsanto which will obviously try to bring in
more transgenic crop seeds into India means that it will use its influence to water down the
farmers’ rights in PPVFR. There is also Wal Mart, the biggest retail giant, on the KIA Board. There
was a lot of public criticism when it was announced that MNCs will be allowed into the food retail
sector, as you would all recall. 100% FDI has been allowed in certain sectors. In retailing, they
have allowed only single-branded activity. Some time back, GoI has allowed 51% FDI in retailing
of food products. Now, Wal-Mart, in partnership with Bharti Telecom, is setting up many retail
chains in India. There are Indian companies too on the job. On the other hand, American farmers
get very little even in a subsidized regime and most of the subsidies go to corporations. My
apprehension is that the fate of the American farmer will get repeated in our country also with
our farmers.

“I would like to give a small example of tobacco production and marketing in our country for
illustrating what I am saying. On tobacco sales, more than 10,000 crores is the excise revenue
for the government and it is one single item which gives the largest revenue. On tobacco, we
have always had regulation of plantation and marketing. In all these years, not even two hundred
crores out of these ten thousand crores have been set aside as a price stabilization fund by the
government for the Tobacco Board to procure the produce in times of need. Now, the Ministry of
Commerce has directed the Tobacco Board to think of removing regulation on tobacco crop
production. In future, anybody can produce any amount of tobacco. This will lead to a predictable
glut situation. This would mean that ITC and other companies would get their …. raw material
for a song from the farmers. One wonders why and to benefit whom has the Commerce Ministry
proposed this new move.

“Let us come to Indian agriculture and its prominence in world agriculture. We are an important
country on the world agricultural map. We stand first in the global production of many products
like mango, banana, cashew, jute, tea and few other crops. We are second in food grain production,
fruits and vegetables. Third in cotton production and fourth in coarse grains. Fifth in eggs and so

83
on. We have a very pivotal place both in area and production. However, productivity levels are far
lower than the levels in other countries including other developing countries in Asia. India is the
second largest producer of fruits and vegetables, after China. However, India stands at the 39th
position when it comes to exports of fruits and vegetables (including processed fruits and
vegetables) into the world markets. The share of our country in world exports at the beginning of
last century was 10%. It had then come down to 2.5% around the time of independence, after
the colonial rule. It has then slipped further to less than 1%. In recent times, our exports of agro-
products and processed products are around 36000 crores, which comes to around 1.6% of
global markets.

“Coming specifically to Food Processing, the Ministry of Food Processing was introduced for the
first time in 1985-86, around 20 years back. All these years, there has been no national policy on
food processing. It is only now that the government is thinking of giving highest priority to food
processing. They expect the present state of affairs to take a dramatic turn for the food processing
sector. Right now, the agro-processing level in the country is around 2% and the 11th Plan period
of the Planning Commission is expected to see this grow to around 10% by 2010 and 25% by
2025. Right now, the value addition is around 7% which the government expects to rise to 20%
in the near future. Now, they are giving certainly incentives. Earlier, in the absence of many
facilities, food processing sector has not mande much headway. In China, the level was 30%.
Even smaller Asian countries had 50% to 100% in developed countries.

“Why has the Indian food processing industry not made much progress? One reason is the very
low purchasing power of a large section of our population. Other reasons include people’s
preferences for fresh and seasonal produce and the government’s indifference for the healthy
and rapid growth of the sector. If this sector is developed considerable section of the farming
population can be absorbed into this sector – farmers will also get a slightly better price, overall
the economy will develop.

“Almost all governments that have come into power at the Centre, irrespective of the political
parties that got into power, somehow neglected this sector. It is an indifference to agriculture
itself and to its allied sectors and food processing sector that is responsible for much of our
backwardness. Otherwise, our agriculture is very special – we have 16 agro-climatic zones of the
world’s 26 zones. We have the largest cropped area and we have the largest irrigated area also.
Most importantly, there are very hard-working farmers who are ready to go to their fields even in
the middle of the night, who are prepared to continue with farming depending upon the vagaries
of the monsoon, with very little support from the government unlike their counterparts in the EU
and US. If the subsidies in the USA are removed, even their 2% of people will not be in farming.

“It is in such a context that the government now wants to support the agri-processing industry.
The policy is to keep the first five years of profits, 100% of such profits, out of the purview of
income tax. Some excise duties have also been reduced.

“What we need to discuss in detail however is the technology used for food processing. In the
KIA, many proposals are made for technologies to be brought here. I personally don’t believe
that these proposals will benefit us much. That is because American technology is a capital
intensive technology where very huge capital is required to set up a plant. In that country the
situation is quite different; it’s a vast country. In our country, people are living in the villages and
the economic levels are poor; the average income of the farmer is Rs. 2150. We will have to re-
look at technologies in this context.
“We also have many premiere, world class institutions. We have the CFTRI in Mysore, which has
developed many products. Similarly the Defence Food Research Laboratories whose initial objective
was to make available instant ready to eat food in the Himalayas so that our soldiers need not
spend much quantity of kerosene or gas for cooking and with least effort they can have food for
their consumption.

“Now with growing urbanization and both husband and wife going into service sector along with
changes in people’s attitudes and food habits, there is growing demand for ready-to-eat foods.
Such foods are already there in the market and the number of companies getting into such
markets is increasing. One important thing with such processed food is that it should be made
available at still lesser prices. All the concessions and waivers that the government has given to
the industry must be passed on to the consumers also. That will happen only when there is
awareness amongst the general public. Information should be made available to the people so
that they can demand from the industry their due share of benefits. Wherever we go abroad in
the initial breakfast they have fruit juice in the breakfast. In our country it is estimated that nearly
30-40% of fruits and vegetables are wasted. The agricultural products wastage is valued at
around 50,000 crores. This, in a country where millions of people are going to sleep on an empty
stomach.

“The government should think of making available these technologies at lesser cost. This needs
investment and financial cooperation from financial institutions to the entrepreneurs who come,
so that they multiply in different areas. If we take the American technology-oriented industry,
then it will be very big. In spite of investment of huge capital only a small number of people will
find employment with their technologies. But the indigenous technologies certainly help in slowly
reduce the percentage of people depending on agriculture by absorbing them into the Agro
processing activity. This is quite a stupendous task. Somehow the government is indifferent.

“As other speakers before me have pointed out, though agriculture is a state subject, they are
not consulted on many important issues and most of the policies and crucial decisions are taken
by Government of India. When the run-up to WTO was happening, I was a Member of Parliament
at that time. We had to fight with the Speaker to give us permission to discuss on the Dunkel draft
on which the commerce secretary had signed there. This had very serious implications on millions
of farmers’ families not just for one or two years, but for a long time to come. They have not
consulted the state governments and the resolutions passed by state assemblies were bypassed
at times. Some of the state assemblies have voted negatively. They have passed resolutions
requesting the government not to sign the GATT agreement – however, the Government of India
went ahead with the signing. There were many promises made at that time – there was a
statement made in the Parliament that the WTO would help Indian farmers. It was projected that
the subsidies in the developed countries will come down; as a result, the prices of agricultural
products will be enhanced. We were told that in our country, the subsidies are minimal and
therefore, the farmers are definitely going to reap the benefits according to Mr Pranab Mukherjee
who was the Commerce Minister at that time. We now have ten years of liberalized trade
experience. The subsidies abroad especially in the EU and the USA have not come down. On the
other hand, they have increased much more. They made it very clear that they are not going to
reduce the level of subsidy either in the US Farm Bill or the Common Agricultural Policy in Europe.
But in our country government is shirking in spite of the fact that the present level of subsidies to
farmers is only 3%.

“Things will not improve unless infrastructural facilities are improved in rural areas – rural roads,
godowns, transportation etc. There must be a godown in every village instead of sending all the

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produce to FCI and other agencies and getting them back into the village again through the PDS.
It is only adding to the transportation cost and spoilage of the produce. In the production areas,
there may be small godowns since the people here are also consumers. Agricultural Market
Committees have to be equipped with quality testing material, cleaning equipment, drying equipment
and so on. Even today, cotton growers are suffering a lot in spite of the presence of Cotton
Corporation of India. Many farmers are feeling that they are not getting justice at the hands of
the cotton corporation of India; the CCI supervisor who is engaged in the task of cotton purchases
from the cotton growers says one thing to the farmer and says differently to the trader with
whom he has collaboration in purchases. These things in marketing are to be addressed.
Otherwise, mere KIA is not going to benefit the farmers of this country in respect of the food
processing and marketing.

“Today when we send our agricultural products to Europe, we find that their standards are quite
stringent. Very often, these act as non-tariff barriers in respect of several commodities which we
export. The compliance to the certification standards is putting lot of burden on the Indian food
processing units which are engaged in the task. The cost of compliance is very high. Government
of India should ensure that these costs come down. Now the government is proposing to start
twenty two food parks in different parts of the country. Only after twenty years after the Ministry
of Food Processing has been set up, the government now thinks it fit to start high quality food
processing training centres in different parts of the country. Even now, (adequate number of)
pesticide testing laboratories are not there. Indian farmers, because they are very poor, they are
small, don’t have much education about the standards that are being prescribed and very often,
are not aware of the pesticides that are banned in those countries. Here, we need to build
awareness of farmers on pesticides not only to facilitate more exports but from their own health
point of view. The government both at centre as well as state has to play a critical role in the food
processing sector. The WB and others have already made their intentions clear – they are not
much bothered about education, research and development and so on in this country. They are
interested only in the marketing of their products. They want our markets to be wide open to
them and I fear that government would also succumb to their pressure.

“I must admit that while I knew of course that KIA would not be to the benefit of farmers, I was
stunned to understand the actual implications of KIA listening to the speakers here. We must put
our collective efforts at Delhi. When the USA has not signed the CBD, how can Government of
India send our valuable biological resources and genetic resources on a platter to the US where
the beneficiaries may not be Indians. Let us fight. Having been a Member of Parliament twice, I
know that though many MPs are from farming community, very few remain in the House when
agriculture or related activity is discussed and debated. Many of them are not aware of the
implications which you have highlighted. These things should be in the form of literature in the
form of leaflets, booklets, brochures circulated. Let us all work together to protect the interests
of the country”.

The Chairperson, while thanking the speakers for their presentations, pointed out that technology
even in the case of agri-processing would have its own political economy and that this political
economy has to be analysed for assessing the technology, its need and relevance. He said that
the technologies that we choose should be suitable to the resources and environment of our
peasant communities – there might be increased processing but this may not necessarily improve
the local economy if we are not careful about choosing the appropriate technology, he pointed
out. We may not be able to create any employment potential if the technologies are wrong. In the
tropical conditions that we live in, most of our traditional technologies of food processing and
preserving are related to dehydration technologies. If we depend on cold-based or chilling-based
technologies, which are essentially imported models, it is going to be very costly given the energy
requirements. With suitable technologies, we can keep the cost of the processed goods low too.

Secondly, free market forces are not going to give any benefits to us. The marketing model that
seems most suitable is that of cooperatives in this country, he argued. However, the government
is not paying any attention to such models. Throughout the KIA agreement, there is no mention
of cooperation or cooperatives. Meanwhile, the share of the producers in the consumer price has
been steadily decreasing over the years and there is much data to support that. For producers
and consumers to benefit we need to organize both these groups into cooperatives and civil
society groups can take a lead in this, he added.

DISCUSSION AFTER THE PRESENTATIONS ON THEME 3 OF THE KIA

• Mr Vijay Jawandhia was the first to speak – he said

that bio-fuels are not likely to benefit farmers. In the
world market today, when palmolein oil is worth around
20-22 rupees a kilo, how can a jatropha-growing farmer
ever hope to get more than that? According to him, this
is a well-thought out plan to shift farmers in our countries
to bio-fuel cultivation while shifting them away from food
production so that we are forced to import food from
the USA and other countries. On the one hand, we are
all predicting that there will be wars for water in the
future and on the other hand, we want to mine deeper
to get water to grow sugarcane for ethanol. Isn’t it
absurd? If we take the example of sugar, it is a good illustration of food processing in
India. The processing technology is fairly easy – put sugarcane here and get sugar
there. Further, marketing is also very easy – we still don’t buy sugar by brand name in
the country. Processing is easy and marketing is easy. However, in this day of free markets,
there is total control of the central government on sugar factories. 60% import duty was
there and state intervention was there. We speak of technology devoid of political economy
– the Americans and Europeans would love to just sell us all these technologies while we
ignore the political economy as though this will solve our farmers’ problems. No solution
will ever work as long as there are double standards from their side. If they stop subsidies
on their side, we can easily feed the world, he said. We can use our own technologies
for bio-fuel production and so on but the more critical question is, are you then going to
give proper price to the farmer?
• Dr Shambu Prasad wanted to know whether we are even choosing the right place
when we want to learn from the US on bio-fuels – Is US competent even technically
when we want to learn about bio-fuels? (In Biotechnology, the US probably has a fair
amount of experience and expertise, even though it is very questionable). Why did we
choose the US as the strategic partner on technology expertise in some spheres….why
not other countries – water management, for instance. Is there some considered decision
on that?
• Mr Udaya Shankar, in the context of the present push for bio-fuels, wanted to know
what happens to the fodder needs of our livestock and what then happens to the livelihoods
of people dependent on livestock in this push for bio-fuels? When it comes to dam-
displaced people, we are constantly talking about non-availability of land for rehabilitating
them, where are we finding lands for bio-fuels and SEZs? On Food Processing, why have
we not progressed on the Amul or Mulkanoor models? In Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu

87
 Naidu created and promoted Self Help Groups of women all over the state and at the end
of the process, probably HLL took over the groups! Even in agro-processing, it is HLL, ITC
and others who are leading. He wanted to know if it is only a dream that we hold of
making agro-processing into an off-farm activity, in the hands of federations of women’s
SHGs while the reality seems to be otherwise?
• Dr Uma Shankari pointed out that we are the largest milk producer in the world and the
entire milk production comes from what could be termed ‘bio-wastes’ – whether it is
agricultural by-products or grazing lands in the commons. We really have to make a
choice then about whether we should be producing milk or producing energy. Even the
bio-wastes are directly giving inputs to some industries like the construction industry.
Brick production for instance comes using bio-wastes. Are we now talking about a longer
process for such materials? Similarly, sugar factories also produce energy directly. If KIA
was really looking for collaborations in the correct areas, they should have asked for
solar energy technologies. Why are we not tapping into the real resources that we have
rather than scarce ones like bio-wastelands?

Response from Mr Ananthapadmanabhan:

• “My point was not to say that the biofuels in wastelands approach will work. I am arguing
that they say that while the real intention is something else. I have no disagreements
with various things that were said about ‘waste’ and its alternative uses”.
• He disagreed with Mr Vijay Jawandhia that this could be a conspiracy to move us away
from food production so that we can import food from the US – Mr Ananthapadmanabhan
felt that the real driver is climate change and the need for fuel for vehicles (the markets
created for it).
• Corn-ethanol is a very big lobby in the US and they do know something about it. Some
institutions have been researching on cellullosic alcohol for decades now.

Response from Mr V S Rao:

• the problem of agrarian distress is very deep-rooted and suicides continue in many parts
of the country. It is related to markets being unable to support farmers and the inability
of banks to lend to small farmers. There is also mischief from traders that adds to the
woes of farmers.

The Chair closed the session by saying that the challenge really in front of us all is to save the
peasantry and to stop the genocide of farmers.
 SESSION 5: Theme 4 of KIA:

Water Management

This session was chaired by Dr V Rukmini Rao, well known women’s rights activist. She
expressed her gladness at the participation of Dr Ramakrishna, Director, Central Research Institute
for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA) in this session and pointed out that civil society is constantly
looking for spaces for dialogue and the official establishment does not necessarily respond.

“The proposals on Water Management in KIA, need &

implications and progress so far”

Dr Ramakrishna, CRIDA began his presentation on “The proposals on Water

Management in KIA, need & implications and progress so far” by saying that even for
people in ICAR, concern
for India is the top
priority. Safeguarding
Indian farmers and
agriculture is a matter of
great concern to the
agriculture scientists, he
said. If along the way,
the agriculture research
establishment has
forgotten or missed
some important issues,
they should be brought
to the notice of the
NARS so that they can
be addressed, he felt.

• The four themes on

which the KIA will work
include (1) Human
Resource Development
and capacity building, which is a cross-cutting theme that will happen in various institutions;
(2) Agri-Processing and marketing which basically aims to capture the huge domestic
market that exists within the country in this sector; (3) Emerging technologies, basically
biotechnology – whatever we say, biotechnology has a promising future and we cannot
just ignore it. We lack expertise in it compared to the rest of the world. The only thing is
that we have to think of utilizing the technology in the best interests of farmers; (4)
Natural Resource Management, which mainly focuses on Water management.
• Under HRD, IPRs, biosafety, food safety, investment conditions, policy & regulatory
frameworks are also listed.
• Under Agri-processing, post-harvest management, value addition, food marketing, cold
chain/product handling are some of the sub-themes.

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• Under Emerging Technologies, biotechnology, nano-technology, nutraceuticals, vaccines
and diagnostics, precision farming, bio-informatics and information technology are chosen.
• Under NRM, water management, soil management, climate change, air quality and waste
management have been proposed.
• After briefly giving an introduction about the origin of the KIA and its chosen themes of
work [selected in December 2005, after internal consultations from amongst the Directors
of various institutions within ICAR], he explained the need for the KIA and presented the
following points:

To enhance quality and relevance of higher education through reorientation and
refinement of course curricula, learning resources and delivery processes. We
are not doing anything relevant to the current conditions of farming. Our education
is mostly theoretical and not applied in nature. Somewhere, we have to give a
fillip to the whole programme to see that our research programmes or higher
education have a relevance to the activities that are needed to be taken up in
the field.

To develop and enhance human capacity with due focus on gender balance in
the emerging areas through training and faculty exchange.

To promote industry-academia interaction, to enhance relevance of education
and research on a changing time scale. Public Private Partnership is where the
future is heading to. We have to take advantage of this situation whether we like
it or not. Right now, it seems to be favouring the private sector more. Clear
roles of what will the industry do and what will the public sector research do
have to be worked out and it becomes very important here.

Development of agricultural marketing and processing industries is a priority for
India’s increasingly need-based and demand driven, market oriented agricultural
sector. Therefore there is a need to develop a framework of public-private
partnership, wherever needed, and promotion of linkages between technology
and the market. Technology innovation by itself is not enough. Linking with the
markets is important. In the NAIP, we are now talking about the total value
chain, from the plough to the plate. A new concept of Plate to Plough is also
being promoted (as in a recent IFPRI workshop). There, we are talking about
the requirements of the community. Food habits and market demands are
changing and therefore, we have design those type of products which are
demanded by the market if we have to be competitive and if we have to benefit
from the market system.

Biotechnological tools can make an important contribution to the sustenance of
the ‘Evergreen Revolution’. Therefore, there is a need to translating the results
of research in the lab into beneficial products that are delivered to farmers.

Improvement of water quality and water use efficiency is vital to the continued
growth and productivity of the agricultural sector of the country. Hence, there is
a need to develop improved technologies and management practices in a
framework that incorporates the needs of multiple stakeholders from lab to
farm

• Under Water Management, the main issue is that every drop of water counts. Water is
the elixir of life. We hardly have 4% of total resources of water of the world but have
15% of human population and 16% of livestock. There are many critical water
management issues in the country – irrigated area is 40% of the total land which
contributes quite significantly to the food production in the country and 83% of water use
is in agriculture. Canal management is very poor with only 40% efficiency. There is also
 a serious fund crunch for improvements in canal systems especially after the 1980s and
stagnation in the growth of this system. This led to the growth of tubewell/groundwater
irrigation. While per hectare cost of tubewell irrigation is Rs. 50,000/-, it is around 1.20
lakhs per hectare in the canal irrigation. Now, 70% of the water use is through tubewells.
This is also quick compared to establishment of canal irrigation. The efficiency of tubewell
system is estimated to be 70%. However, over-exploitation of groundwater systems is
affecting the sustainability of the production systems. Many areas are becoming Grey
Zones with groundwater levels constantly going down. On the other hand, the demand
for freshwater was 634 billion cubic meters in 2000 and will jump dramatically to 1447
BCM in 2050. Competition from industry and energy is also increasing against water use
in agriculture – a scenario of 6-8 fold increase in the industry sector and around a 4-fold
increase in the energy sector. There will be more waste water generated from all these
sectors. This requires to be used appropriately to reduce pollution as well as to make
use of such water. Agriculture sector would be forced to use such water over 1.5 million
hectares. 25% of the groundwater is already of poor quality. This is really the time to
manage water water as a resource and to plan its use in a scientific, cost effective way.
• The other issues include the fact that per capita availability of water varies quite a lot
across regions. Due to variation in rainfall, some regions have floods and some regions
face frequent droughts. There is a need for scope to divert unutilized rainwater (either
surface or sub-surface storages) or linking to river systems.
• Even with all these options, 50% of the area in the country will be rainfed with low
productivity. Here, there is a need for enhancing participatory watershed programmes.
Rainfed areas development has to be take place with watershed programmes as the
base. Monitoring of watersheds using new tools like GIS and remote sensing becomes
important. Developing of effective drought prediction, monitoring and long term drought
proofing strategies are an important need. This includes contingency crop planning,
crop diversification, efficient rain water use (more crop per drop or more income per
drop), Spatial DSS for on-farm management, effective knowledge empowerment of
farmers through ICT and weather advisories, forewarning systems for real time
information transfer to farmers and planners and so on.
• Focus areas in KIA are: Agriculture-related, non-point source pollution; Waste water
management; Re-use of wastewater for irrigation; Early warning systems for agricultural
drought; Crop condition assessment techniques; Soil–water–plant interactions, and Use
of modern tools in water management. A set of activities have been listed under each
focus area for Water Management.
• Under Water Quality Management & Remediation, the activities are:

Point and non-point source pollution

Recycling and re-use of waste waters

Productive use of marginal and poor quality waters including aquaculture

Shallow aquifer remediation
• Under Assessment and management of Agricultural Drought, the activities planned are:

Early warning systems

Crop condition assessment techniques

Impact of climate change on droughts and identification of hot spots

Improved conservation agriculture techniques
• Under Soil-Water-Plant Interaction systems, activities listed are:

Water-integrated-tillage interactions on crop productivity and soil and water
quality (no tillage or zero tillage systems to be studied)

Carbon dynamics including sequestration and nutrient pools and fluxes in relation
to investment in energy and inputs

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Modelling the impact of water-nutrients-tillage interactions on crop growth and
sustainability parameters
• Sustainable use of Groundwater will need the following identified activities:

Coastal aquifer management – creation of sub surface fresh water barrier for
arresting salinity ingress

Management of Aquifer recharge in water deficit areas

Deep aquifers utilization and management
• Under Use of modern tools in water management, the activities proposed are:

Integrating space and information technology with water management for
planning and decision making

Decision support systems for management of uncertainty and risk in irrigated
commands and rainfed agriculture

Cost effective water and energy efficient irrigation systems and automation
• There are three programmes have been identified on a priority basis which will be taken
up under the KIA. These include: (1) Impact assessment of the prevalence and severity
of agricultural drought on various spatial and temporal scales; (2) Agricultural drought
management strategies for improved performance of soils, crops and livestock under
varying rainfall and groundwater potential situations (here, integrated farming systems
are being talked about); and (3) Spatial decision support systems for value-added agro-
advisories. These were evolved in a workshop where 20 scientists from the US and
around 30 scientists from India worked in smaller groups first and then discussed together
the priority areas. He explained further the objectives and programmes under identified
priorities (refer to the powerpoint presentation)
• Priority 1 is ‘Agricultural Drought Management Strategies for Soil, Crop and Livestock for
improving livelihood of farmers under different agro-climatic zones’ and Priority 2 is
‘Decision Support Systems for Agro-advisories in Rainfed Areas and Participatory Irrigation
Management in Canal Commands’.
• The expected benefits from the programmes include: Initiation of frontier research
programs, Exchange of knowledge, Human resource development, Infrastructure
development and Strengthening of public-private partnership.
• The Fourth Board Meeting of the KIA was held in November 2006 and many deliverables
from the bilateral initiative were finalized here. Capacity building, curriculum development
and water management will be taken up. Biotechnology-related work would be taken up
in 2007. For 2007, twelve Borlaug Fellows have been identified from India. Focus is on
wheat, stress and salinity tolerance. CIPHET in Ludhiana has been identified for cold
chains for fruit and vegetables. CIFT for fish will be developed in 2007 along with food
processing research. Pigeonpea genomics using EST, QTL and BAC library has begun
along with University of California, Davis. Water management projects will be taken up
jointly along with the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges.
Private sector is expected to play an important role in supplementing public sector efforts,
for future linkages maybe through contract farming. Other collaborative projects will be
identified and operationalised. The next meeting is slated for June 2007 in Washington.
• Similar to the concerns being expressed by civil society groups here, within ICAR too,
there are discussions on “Scientific Vigilance”. A training programme was organized in
Karnal for all Directors of ICAR institutions organized by CVC, CBI and ICAR. This is
specifically vigilance related to scientific materials, knowledge and skills. Some of the
areas discussed include Access to and disclosure of bio-resources, traditional knowledge
and scientific information [there are some restrictions on this]; Bio-terrorism (biological
weapons especially microbes); Biosecurity and Agro-terrorism – food safety, plant and
animal life and associated environmental risks that cover pests, diseases and other such
 risks; Checking the introduction and release of GMOs and their products; Check on
introduction of invasive and alien plant species like weeds; National Biodiversity Authority
under the Biological Diversity Act is the authority for deciding benefit-sharing; All
collaborative projects involving bio-resources should follow NBA guidelines. All materials
to be registered at NBPGR and get an IC number. Only then can information be exchanged
with the permission of Government of India. We first need to identify the base material
as ours. Once that is done, exchange of materials is not a problem. There will be a two-
tier system of control at the Centre and at the Institute levels. The idea is to balance
openness with security. It was decided that unauthenticated new record of diseases and
pests not to be made public – someone, out of their own enthusiasm, went looking for
the mad cow disease in India recently for instance. This will have a lot of repercussion
on our agricultural products the moment somebody makes an unauthenticated public
statement. It was also decided to put in place a pre-publication review of sensitive
research publications. These are the kinds of issues identified and sought to be tackled
in anticipation of various problems emerging later on. In the interest of the nation, the
NARS also identifies such issues and tries to put into place checks and controls beforehand.

He concluded his presentation by reiterating that the agricultural research establishment also
tries to analyse all these emerging issues beforehand and to the extent possible, tries to create
systems to manage them.

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 “Drought Proofing & Indian Agriculture – Relevance and
Implications of the KIA”

The second speaker in this session was Mr Udaya Shankar, Advisor-NRM in Centre for
World Solidarity who spoke about “Drought Proofing & Indian Agriculture – Relevance
and Implications of the KIA”. He
pointed out that water is an issue of
great concern and that there are many
debates that are happening to address
the crisis, to address issues of equity,
conservation, quality and so on. For
instance, there was a workshop that
Centre for World Solidarity had
organized for three days on Water &
Democracy. Then, there are debates
continuing on major dams, like in the
case of Polavaram. In that sense, there
may not be many new things to be said
on Water, he added. Many of the main
points in his presentation, where he
asked relevant questions related to
Water not just related to what is
written and proposed under the Water Management section of the KIA, but what KIA as a whole
would add up to and imply, when it comes to Water, are captured below.

• In the context of the KIA, there are some more questions that need to be asked on water
and drought-proofing. For instance, drought proofing in the context of climate change
and degradation of soil and water resources demands different strategies but not what
is proposed under Indo-US collaboration on KIA, he argued. Climate change will worsen
the agricultural situation not only in the arid and semi-arid zones of India, but also
coastal zones. Under global/bilateral partnerships climate change and water management
should be tackled in tandem. However, USA is yet to commit itself to arrest climate
change whereas India endorsed the Kyoto protocol. Such being the situation, we should
not have entered into an agreement with USA for drought proofing through KIA. He also
said that KIA negates three important Dublin – Rio principles.
• Water development and management should be based on a participatory approach,
involving users, planners and policy makers at all levels. KIA unfortunately assigns no
role for the users. Women play a central part in the provision, management and
safeguarding of water. Such knowledge of rural women and men does not seem to have
any place in the scheme of things envisaged by the KIA.
• Rio-Agenda 21, Section 18.8 enshrines that “Fresh water being a natural resource is a
social and economic good (not commercial)”. It is also said that unsustainable mining of
ground water leads to a ‘food bubble economy’.
• He also felt that in the case of water management collaboration with European Union
would have made more sense (than collaborating with the USA) as their Water Framework
Directive states that “Water is not a commercial product like any other but rather, a
heritage which must be protected, defended and treated as such. How to look at water
as a resource is thus no straightforward matter”. Any bilateral or multilateral partnership
 should be on our terms, especially when such partnerships seem to come with a
camouflaged commercial motive.
• It appears that agricultural scientists and students who will be participating in KIA have
nothing to do with the rural communities under any of the four identified themes. Mutual
learning opportunities for the researchers/students and the farming communities, essential
for drought proofing, are not built into KIA.
• On biotechnology being one of the tools for drought management, he argued that drought
tolerant transgenic crops, if any, would add to the cost of cultivation. Farmers, having
spent quite a sum on GM seeds, tend to use more agro-chemicals and even water as the
case of Bt Cotton cultivation shows on the ground. Water saving on account of GM crops
is only a theoretical claim. Farmers in drought prone areas can’t afford GM crops.
• There is no organic link built into at least the four themes chosen for work by the KIA.
For instance, food-processing and marketing section of the KIA talks about agri-business
opportunities for Indian corporates and the American multi-national companies but does
not conceive of any off-farm and non-farm livelihood opportunities for farmers in drought
prone areas. It really seems to be an ever-green revolution that is being thought of, to
keep the corporates ever-green, he opined.
• Coming to bio-fuels, non-edible oil seed production in arid and semi-arid zones would
only reduce fodder availability affecting the livestock economy of the drought hit farmers
and also alienate the common property resource lands from the villagers. The effect of
contract farming would also be the same. How will this contribute to drought-proofing
then?
• We all know that what Lester Brown said is true that water scarcity really crosses the
national boundaries via the international grain trade. Coming specifically to the proposals
in the KIA related to Water Management, there is no participatory element in the
development of water technologies and management practices that are supposed to
improve water quality and water use efficiency. It is not clear how and who will be
assessing the needs of the multiple stakeholders from lab to farm for developing
technologies through research. There is also no scope evident at all for alternative water
management practices as have seen in this country. The renovation of tanks that we see
in Rajasthan or experiences where social regulation played a key role in water
management are all part of our rich experience in this country. All of this finds no place
at all in the KIA.
• On Water quality management and remediation, there are some proposals in the KIA.
Mining and other industries and agro-chemicals and pesticides have been polluting our
soil and water resources including rivers, reservoirs, tanks and ground water. Situation
analysis in KIA proposal does not deal with the status of implementation of environmental
laws. There is no recognition of the interdisciplinary nature of water quality management
and remediation. Unless at least institutional linkages are built with Pollution Control
Boards, NEERI and others, there is really no evidence of ICAR being able to deal with
industrial effluents. Whole rivers in places like Orissa have been turned acidic with
industrial contaminants. Down south, some dams like Varathupalayam are ending up
only impounding Tirupur industrial effluents. Downstream, all wells are getting polluted.
How can ICAR treat such waters?
• The KIA also talks about Soil-water-plant interactions having to be researched under
Water Management. Why does this theme not study innovations like System of Rice
Intensification under soil-water-plant interactions? Why not, because it would certainly
contribute a lot to improving the water use efficiency. Similarly, on water policy decision
support system, various technologies are proposed to be used like Information technology,
remote sensing and GIS technologies. It says that they will be used for water resources

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 assessment and monitoring to eliminate time consuming, inefficient and costly manual
techniques for data generation for information to the policy makers. Community based
organisations and their role in generating data on the following vital aspects of droughts
and water resources are not recognised or given space in the scheme of things - Early
warning systems, Quantification of drought impacts, Strategies for minimizing impacts,
Timely information services, Accurate spatial data on actual water use, Water demand,
Allocation and distribution of water, Crop yields etc. Catchment Councils in Zimbabwe,
Community groundwater management experiences in Anantapur etc., are all examples
of how communities manage their water resources through a policy decision support
system in place. This includes even appropriate early warning systems. Drought is also
a disaster and drought management requires community decision-making, planning,
control, implementation and review etc.
• SRI is a water-saving technique and also an efficient irrigation system which would
enhance yields and certainly not reduce yields. Only modern pressurized irrigation
systems, but not SRI, are considered under KIA. The proposals seem to be meant for
benefiting Jain Irrigation Systems and the like rather than communities themselves.
• On Ground water quantity and quality management, the situation analysis in the proposal
does not deal with the existing legal framework in various states and status of
implementation and does not analyse the positive and negative elements of the existing
regulations governing ground water. It is as if the Agricultural Scientists need not bother
about social regulations of Water Resource Management (WRM) as part of their research.
Research on institutional innovations and participatory aspects of water management is
not considered under KIA. The entire approach is a negation of our own Constitution –
water comes under Doctrine of Public Trust. This Doctrine should govern our natural
resources be it forests or common lands or water. There are so many Supreme Court
judgements which recognize rights related to water. From Article 21 to Agenda 21, it is
enshrined everywhere.
• KIA does not deal with ongoing efforts at integrated water resources management and
river basin management. KIA orients the Agricultural Graduates and researchers towards
Indian corporates and MNCs engaged in GM technologies and marketing of processed
agro-produce and orients them away from the farmers. Drought proofing under KIA
does not benefit the drought hit farmers. On the contrary, corporates interested in bio-
fuel plantations and SEZs are likely to be given CPR lands.
• According to him, the alternative lies in Research on Integrated Water Resources
Management (as per the original definition and not the WB’s definition), a process that
promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land and related
resources, in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable
manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems (Global Water
Partnership 2000). This is essential for arriving at possible solutions. Anil Agarwal,
remarking about what India needs, once said that “….. by doing a total rethink on
‘appropriate’ river basin management, India can trade drought-proofing over vast areas
by sacrificing irrigation of small areas”. Social and legal literacy should form part of
building capacities of our students and scientists where they should work closely with
communities rather than being cut off from them. Our politicians and bureaucrats who
are responsible for the KIA should also be educated on our own Constitutional, legal and
institutional frameworks in addition to our social reality.

He concluded by saying that this KIA looks like it will not help us achieve our Millenium Development
Goals but rather take us away from them.
The Chairperson thanked him and Dr Ramakrishna and commented that these were two well
formulated agendas for future dialogues. She requested two other participants who have worked
on the issue of water and communities and have rich experience on the subject to share their
thoughts on the KIA proposals related to water management, before opening the floor for further
discussions.

Mr Umendra Dutt of Kheti Virasat Mission in Punjab spoke next. “When the British came to
India, after looking at our systems here, they said that India is a Hydrological Society. The
traditions related to water are thousands of years old here. In fact, you will even find water
structures that are thousands of years old to this day. The British founded their first engineering
college in Roorkee. Madras, Delhi, Mumbai – all these major cities were under their control.
However, they chose to ignore all these big cities and chose to go to Roorkee which had a
population of just 800 people in those days. Why did they have to start an engineering college
there? Before answering that, let me share the experience of the kind of work that goes on in
Uprekal village of Uttaranchal where some of the best work related to forest regeneration and
water conservation is taking place, without any external funding and even any government funding.
It took 18 years for completely denuded lands to become green again and for the mountain
springs to find water again. Once I took a group of people from NGOs of Himachal Pradesh and
Jammu & Kashmir to take part in a workshop there. There was a meeting with the villagers on
the last day. One Ph.D. member of our group asked a question to the youngest representative of
the village who was present in the meeting – to a ninth class student. ‘You are all working on the
issue of environment here in this village – why’, this scientist wanted to know. That boy said that
they were not working on the issue of environment. That they were doing this for the Himalayan
deities. If it is for the deities, then I won’t ask for an honorarium. I will not ask others for the
know-how of pleasing my gods and goddesses. It only takes commitment and dedication. That
was the kind of value system that drove work related to water in this country. On Water, for sure,
USA is disabled and there is nothing for India to learn from them on this issue. It is not clear at
all why we should want to learn from them.

“Another small example relates to Jaisalmer town which was on the Silk Route. Even 1200 years
ago, its population was around 100,000 people. From Jaisalmer thousands of camels used to
travel all the way to the Middle East for trade and the town could accommodate them. There was
no World Bank or Indira Gandhi canal during those days. Who used to provide water to these
thousands of camels as well as the camelherds? It was the community of Jaisalmer, which did not
learn anything from America. “Khud Mukhthari, tab sardaari” was their slogan – they were self-
reliant.

“Today, we have much talk about Water Mission technologies. Who are these people who are
telling us about technologies? They are ones who look at water as a tradeable commodity. For
us, the rivers are Goddesses. Water is God Varun. Each drop of water is considered as a gift from
the gods here. For a country which had a vision (and a value system) like this about water, there
is no need to learn from others. In the name of water also, they would like to give us biotechnology
because that is the only thing that they really want to give.

“When India became independent in 1947, there were only 126 villages which were classified as
‘No Source villages’ where there was no drinking water. Today, we have more than one lakh such
villages! Is this what we call as progress and development? We have only increased the dark
zones in the country over the years. We continue to contaminate all our rivers today. This is
because of our model of development we adopted, our lifestyle. Without changing our style of
living, there is no hope that we can ever save water”.

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“The people who have drafted the KIA proposals on water management are probably ignorant of
our heritage and tradition related to water management. IN the name of modern technology, we
only taught people to extract more and more water from the earth. In Punjab, more than 85% of
the blocks are already dark zones. This is going to be the situation all over the country. How can
we propose and talk about deeper aquifers in a situation like this? Exploit deeper aquifers and
call it development? In this whole KIA proposal, community as a concept is missing, community
knowledge and traditions/practices are missing. On top of that, a community’s rights towards
water resources as well as responsibilities are completely untouched in these proposals. After
looking at the KIA document, I feel that we need to have a separate workshop just on the water
management proposals at the national level given the grave implications of this proposal”.

He concluded by saying that no technology in the world can save water – it has to be a Water
Order, a social discipline, that finally can save water for us and our future generations and for
other living organisms. Water conservation is not a matter of a technology. It is about lifestyles
and it is about a vision or worldview of life. Without bringing up and addressing sustainable and
judicious use of water, how can we talk about water management? It had always been a matter
of philosophy and principle for us in this country.

Mr A Ravindra, Secretary, WASSAN was requested by the Chair to share his thoughts on
the subject of KIA proposals on water management. The main points he made were:

• He tried to put the whole debate in a macro-context. Two things hit us starkly. First is the
reducing percentage of dependence of the economy on agriculture in India. The other is
the almost stable percentage of population dependent on agriculture. It seems like the
whole national economy has declared its independence from agriculture and the people
dependent on it.
• There is a data set that is looking at the quantified average annual loss of the Gross
Domestic Product at the state level of Andhra Pradesh. If you aggregate the loss of GDP
due to drought in an year, that is less than 2% in the year that sees the severest drought
in Andhra Pradesh [in 2002]. Andhra Pradesh has suffered a lot in terms of people
dependent on agriculture, their livestock, their crops etc. and their suffering. But the
economy did not suffer. It declared its independence from the misery of people. The
economy therefore declared its independence from agriculture and the economy has
also declared its independence from the misery of people.
• In this juncture, it seems that the agriculture research establishment has also declared
its independence from the farmers of the country. I think that is where KIA is most
threatening. When you look at the drought spectre in the country, what is alarming is the
impact of drought on small farmers. This is especially so in rainfed areas where water is
available, where water is used for various purposes but not to save the agriculture of the
people. In this situation, if we have to draw a research agenda from the actual situation
on the ground, the content of the Initiative has to be something very different from what
it is. The KIA however talks about high-precision systems, policy decision support systems
based on remote sensing and so on, high elevation irrigation systems, pivot and linear
irrigation systems etc. All these systems are large scale high water-intensive systems
which are there in the West. If we look at the pivot irrigation system for example, each
pivot irrigation system irrigates some 300 acres in one stroke. In 300 acres, you might
even cross from one village to the next here! Are these the systems that we should learn
from the USA? Is that the research content that we want to build within the KIA? Or,
should we be looking at the real problems we have?
 • Let us look at two sectors specifically – irrigation and irrigation in drought areas. Climate
change is also mentioned. We have the tank irrigation systems which have hardly received
any attention from the formal institutions so far except modeling of tank flows. Earlier,
tanks used to operate in three year cycles. The tanks were designed for three year
cycles where they assume one good rainfall year and two bad years. It still provides two
good crops even in an adverse situation. And such a system sustains livelihoods. Now,
the variations are high. In the last ten years, tanks have filled up only twice or thrice.
Often times, lands under the tanks are kept fallow in anticipation of rains. So, this is how
our irrigation systems are affected by Climate Change. Does the KIA look at this kind of
phenomenon that is the reality on the ground? Are we looking at how intercropping is
disappearing because of rainfall fluctuations early in the monsoons? This phenomenon
has a great correlation to sustainable livelihoods and sustainability in the drylands.

If we are willing to look at the reality on the ground and are willing to draw a scientific agenda
out of that, then the ICAR has a lot more to contribute. If ICAR has however declared its
independence from the farmers and the people and is making a bold statement that the private
sector is our clientele, then the private sector’s demands are pivot systems, the Israel technologies
and so on. Andhra Pradesh has the now infamous Kuppam experience and it is well known what
happened there. Is that what we want? We now want to bring in the American irrigation systems
into India – it’s a meaningless thing to do. Why should the ICAR system, which is paid from our
taxes, be drawn into such research agenda?

He concluded by urging that we should define the problem properly before preparing the content
of research. Before we talk about what our students should learn, can the ICAR first get accountable
to its people?, he asked.

DISCUSSION AFTER THE PRESENTATIONS ON THEME 4 OF THE KIA

1. Mr Bharat Mansata informed that India, next to South America has the highest amount
of rainfall in the whole world. Yet, every year, we are facing an increasing scarcity of
water with the quality declining. While talking about most of our water use going into
irrigation, it is also necessary to see where most of this water is being used for what.
Maharashtra has the largest number of big and medium dams in India. Maharashtra
and Gujarat together are supposed to have
more big and medium dams than the rest of
India combined. How is the water used? In
Maharashtra, 70% of the irrigation waters
go to 3-4% of the cultivable area for growing
sugarcane. As a result we not only over-
exploit and waste water, but progressively,
see more and more lands out of commission
due to high salinisation. For our future, it is
necessary to check the use of water and
more so the groundwater. We seem to be
going in the reverse direction, however. The
greatest reservoir of water is literally our
underground aquifers of water which can
store a much larger volume of water than
all our surface storage structures together. If we re-vegetate our country with a diversity
of crop and tree species, we’ll be able to recharge a huge amount of groundwater which

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 is safe from evaporation, safe from salinisation and the decentralized water resource
gets far more into the control of the local community. The tree planting will also give
multiple benefits obviously. Why should we not take straight-forward common sense
solutions instead of talking about technologies whose relevance we can barely begin to
understand?, he demanded.
2. Mr Jacob Nellithanam reminded everyone that we should not forget the role of
agricultural diversity in relation to water. If we look at the rice diversity that we used to
have, and look at the GR, it is apparent that the Green Revolution delinked the varieties
from the weather patterns, varied growing conditions, the variety of cropping systems
etc. For example, in rice, there are varieties which can come up in 45-50 days as well as
upto 210 days. Such a large diversity has been reduced to varieties which will respond
within a period of time - time-bound varieties. Our agricultural diversity was photo-
sensitive. That means it was linked to the weather and the sunshine days. There are
varieties that can grow up to 30 feet of water and if there is no such water, will grow
upto six feet! Now, all these characteristics that we used to have in our native diversity
are being promised through biotechnology – resilience to drought or flood, to salinity
and so on. Our native diversity in any case had the potential to adjust to and adapt to a
variety of situations and conditions that develop over a period of time. This knowledge
and resource is now sought to be controlled in exchange for some technology that they
promise.
3. Dr Uma Shankari had a question to Dr Ramakrishna. She expressed her thanks to him
as the only official representative in the workshop, for running the participants through
the whole KIA proposal and not just the water management proposals. She wanted to
know his assessment of the US’s interest in entering into this collaboration. What are the
actual critical areas where we should actively seek collaboration?, she wanted to know.

Response from Dr Ramakrishna:

• It is more the interest of India than the US in entering into this agreement. Our Prime
Minister himself has asked for this kind of a support from the Americans. There’s been
a stagnation of yields for the past ten years in this country. The irrigated areas are not
performing well and we are really unable to push production in the rainfed areas. Today,
we are having to import wheat and this is a very alarming situation. We are importing
oilseeds and other products too. This is the main concern of the Government of India.
• In the eleventh plan at least, we should be able to do something about these issues. We
have only been talking about the second green revolution, that it has to come from
rainfed areas and so on. For really taking this challenge on, we need something that will
empower our scientists also. Today, our scientists are good. But most work is sporadic,
here and there. We really need to develop a core group of scientists in specific chosen
fields who can contribute to the future of Indian agriculture. We need to build our
institutions for our perspective for 2025. That is one of the reasons for this [KIA] approach.
• While talking about KIA, we should not forget that it is only a 350-crore programme,
which is a pittance really. We have had a NATP programme earlier for around 250 crores
which had not brought about any changes really. This is only to build up our strengths
across the establishment. This is just one more joint initiative. There is probably no
need to look at this with a magnifying glass. The caution being sounded is well appreciated,
of course. However, in certain areas, we are really lagging behind as in the case of
biotechnology. The ICAR is mooting some new institutions to address this - National
Institute of Agriculture Biotechnology, National Institute for Bio-stress Management and
 National Institute for Abiotic Stress Management. “The idea is to have a pool of genes
which can be provided to other institutions within the ICAR”, he added.
• As far as the US is concerned, they are trying to push up their Land Grant Colleges which
are actually minority institutions within the American agriculture system. They have very
little exposure and they will get an opportunity through such research collaborations to
improve their knowledge.

He concluded by saying that ICAR is trying to build its own capacities through the KIA so that it
can serve the country better.

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 CONCLUDING SESSION:

Way Forward

Dr N K Sanghi, an agricultural
scientist, facilitated this last
session with some support from
Kavitha Kuruganti. He mentioned
that new perspectives and points
at this point of time (of the
workshop) are not very crucial
compared to consolidation of what
emerged during all the earlier
discussions. If something critical
was missing, then it could be
brought up but reiteration of
something that has been already
said is not so important, he pointed
out. He suggested a structure for
the session to help consolidate the
discussions so that some concrete
outputs emerge. He proposed
three main questions to be answered as a way forward:

• Whether we reject or accept the Indo – US collaboration as it has been designed

• Whether there is any scope for improving the design and delivery of the KIA
• How do we improve the alternative paradigm with respect to generation of new knowledge
as well as upscaling of existing successful experiences?
• Anything else that needs to be stated and discussed.

There were several participants who felt that as per the current understanding, there is nothing
to learn from America and that there was no need for the KIA. Our culture is many thousands of
years old while the American culture as we know it today is only 400-500 years old. What would
they have to teach us?.

Several ideas about the way forward that came in the first two rounds of the discussions in the
concluding session are given below.

• A participant said that if at all we have to learn anything from the US, it is lawlessness
because it is a country which has consistently rejected amongst other things, three
important international treaties – Convention on Biological Diversity [CBD], Kyoto Protocol
on Climate Change and the Cartagena protocol on Biosafety. The USA has signed none
of them and India has ratified all of them. How can India, which professes to adhere to
these international protocols, ever have any discussions with the USA contrary to these?
• An idea is to begin by writing an Open Letter to the Prime Minister, since he initiated this
bilateral deal, voicing all our concerns and anxieties which have emerged more clearly
from the current workshop. All points covered in the workshop should be articulated
clearly and this Open Letter should be released to all English and vernacular media.
• A letter to America demanding that it re-declare the gene bank in Fort Collins as an
international heritage, a global commons and ensuring that it is not excluded for others,
particularly for the communities which have originally contributed to the collection.
• The Open Letter/petition can also be sent to the President of India, the Lok Sabha Speaker
and Mrs Sonia Gandhi.
• If a team of ex-Prime Ministers can be formed, something might come out of it.
• It would be useful to have one or two state governments/Chief Ministers to declare that
this deal is not acceptable to them for specific stated reasons. Some such states could
be Chattisgarh, Kerala etc. It would be good if they actually filed a case in the Supreme
Court that they were not consulted on such an important issue while this is essentially a
state [government] subject.
• A meeting in Delhi might be useful even in terms of media outreach on the deal. Different
topics such as bio-diversity, water etc., could be covered there. For instance, Tarun
Bharat Sangh can be asked to initiate a workshop on Water and KIA while Kalpavriksh
can do so in the case of Biodiversity and KIA.
• We are formulating the question about rejection or acceptance wrongly [‘it is a
programme that is already being implemented and our rejecting or accepting may not
make a difference’]. We should probably be trying to see what KIA means to the USA,
what is its connection with the nuclear deal and get a public debate going.
• While other analyses about the KIA can emerge as we go along (including what other
implications, what connections with other processes and so on), it is important to begin
articulating the perceived dangers clearly as well as ensuring that such dangers are not
allowed to befall Indian farmers and farming. There are imminent threats being perceived
from this agreement - do we want to alert someone critical about it, do we want to
share our analysis with someone, do we want to mobilize more people around it, against
it; do we want to make the government accountable….
• We should not just be intellectualizing – we should embarrass the institutions concerned.
Hang a board outside the Krishi Bhawan. List out questions and ask for answers. There
might be several scientists who might be concerned for their own reasons. Let us open
up the questions by taking the questions to the authorities concerned. Call this the early
warning system. Let them answer.
• Going by what the Director of CRIDA had shared in the meeting, it is the Indian NARS
that is driving the KIA and not the USA. There might also be a desperation about what to
do and how to do to resolve many problems related to Indian farming including
productivity. From this, a certain way of going forward might have emerged. Our response
should take this possibility into account.
• We have many disagreements related to the technologies and a techno-centric approach
that we see in the KIA. Is there any use of asking for a space and scope for civil society
participation in the review and monitoring of the KIA at least? The US Board has apparently
provided space for some civil society representation – not so on the Indian side. Can we
ensure through such spaces a feedback and learning opportunity for policy-makers and
safeguard against undue commercial interests, IPR dangers and so on?
• Everybody wants to write off the KIA as a small project in the overall scheme of things in
the NARS – even the KIA budget is a small part of the overall ICAR budget. However, all
these small projects seem to be consuming a lot of our research system’s time. What is
it that we want our NARS to work on? What should that mandate be and who should give
that? Can we put forth proactively such a mandate and then push for it? For example,
the Directorate of Rice Research is so pre-occupied with hybrid and GE rice that it does
not seem to have any time for SRI. Can we put forward a research agenda for them and
demand that it be addressed?

103
 • The whole KIA was designed and signed during the peak of farmers’ suicides crisis.
When this was signed and the top leaders and technocrats talked about it in glowing
terms, they never thought about what should be done here to solve the crisis. If they
were thinking about the crisis, the KIA would not be about promoting Industry-Academicia
interactions but about Farmer-Academicia interactions as the way out.
• The Land Grant colleges in the USA must be a minority in that country. We can probably
recommend to them to come and see what our paradigm is and learn.
• All legal and political options should be explored, especially related to our genetic resources.
We should press for one key point which is that our resources should be given back to
us.
• Legal measures have to be taken up in coordination with allies in Delhi. Similarly, literature
on the implications of the KIA is to be made available to parliamentarians so that there
is a substantial discussion on both floors of parliament and pressure mounted on the
government.
• We should demand for a hold on the implementation. We should ask this of the
Government of India, ICAR. There should be a hold on implementation for at least six
months to discuss various issues of concern.
• We should identify a group of agriculture scientists who are willing to do a thorough
critique of the KIA and get it done.
• We should target the leader of Opposition and educate him about the implications of the
KIA.
• We need to look in detail at agricultural education and where it is headed. We have had
some discussions on agriculture research but have neglected the education part. Many
universities have begun changing their syllabus and we need to study this carefully and
highlight concerns there.
• It was pointed out that we should widen and improve the space available for the other
side in such workshops [the American side, formal research scientists, policy makers
etc.]. We should find ways of providing feedback and learning opportunities to the US
farmers, colleges, our own policy makers etc.
• If we do a systematic comparison between the Indo-US Nuclear Deal and the KIA, for
their similarities and differences, the language will come out in a better form.
• We should declare an Indo-Bharat Knowledge Initiative with people like Bhaskar Save in
the Chair and modern scientists like Dr Rupela (in the ICRISAT who is doing path-breaking
work on validating some farmers’ practices) as Members.
• We have had major impacts with people’s movements and civil society work on the
environment front. We have had State of the Environment reports which have also had
good impact. However, agriculture was not thought of, outside such environmental impact.
We need an Annual Review of Agriculture, which is unsentimental and hard-hitting.
Issues have to be systematically and ruthlessly analysed here.
• Can we use global warming arguments to persuade against energy intensive farming
and put restrictions on such models?

There was then another round of brainstorming on the alternative paradigm and the ways to
promote it. It is not just about the technical part of the alternative paradigm but also about its
relevance to our situation and so on, pointed out Dr Sanghi. Do we even have a terminology
worked out to communicate what we mean by this alternative paradigm? While the existing
paradigm talks about chemical, industrial, evergreen, violent, transgenic agriculture we seem to
be talking about organic, natural, ecological, regenerative, non-violent farming.
A framework for assessment, from multiple perspectives was forwarded given in the tabular
form below.

Sl Parameter Indo-US KIA Alternative

No paradigm
1 Relevance for farmers and their real life
situation
2 Technical efficiency
• Short-term
• Long-term
3 Biodiversity
4 Trade/Commerce
5 Self-reliance
6 Ecology
7 Building upon past lessons
8 Democratization of processes
9 Solution to the farmers’ crisis
(suicides, indebtedness,
adverse markets etc)
10 Overall sustainability
11 Food Security
12 Any other

On improving the alternative paradigm with respect to generation of new knowledge as well
as upscaling of successful experiences, the following points came out of the discussions:

• Sensitizing the NARS should be an agenda for us. We have put in very little effort,
resources and attention on that front.
• A concrete programme with the ICAR documenting our genetic resources and traditional
knowledge is required to bring such resources back to our system. We should see whether
this deal is outside the Biological Diversity legislation in the country and whether there
are legal ways to counter it.
• We need a system whereby the common knowledge of communities needs to be re-
established with them and the government institutions meant for farming have to go and
learn from the communities with full dedication. Government interest in this kind of
knowledge has to be created.
• While talking about alternatives, we need to bring in the agricultural workers too. Their
primary concerns are of land, wages and dignified living. How do we build synergies
between them and others in this alternative paradigm because the old system was, all
said and done, exploitative and was oppressive to particular communities for it to thrive.
• For most complex issues that we face today, civil society gets its energy from the community,
from the farmers. We have learnt many things through trial and error, along with
communities. Let the agriculture scientists also come to the field and then we can have
a partnership. We need not go to the US to learn. If going to the field here is not
sufficient, let us find partners in other Asian countries, especially ones with similar agro-

105
 climatic conditions. We actually have enough expertise and experience in the country.
We just need new kinds of partnerships for solutions to be found.
• We need to evolve new institutional and financial mechanisms for promoting participatory
research including participatory breeding and for upscaling successful experiences. In
the case of AP and the upscaling of NPM to two lakh acres, this emerged in the form of
the federated women’s self help groups all over the state.
• A critical mass of successful experiences is important for alternatives to really make a
dent.
• There are persuasive approaches as well as confrontative approaches that are possible.
One way of engaging with the agriculture research establishment on alternatives is to
throw a public challenge at them. Show your best practices and we will show ours – let
us decide parameters of assessment before hand and see who has the best practices for
our farming.
• An alternative breeding paradigm will be rewarded by the Richharia Prize given away
annually from now on.
• Similarly, an alternative agriculturist award should be constituted and given away every
year to highlight the alternative paradigm.

The workshop ended by Ms Kavitha Kuruganti thanking everyone for taking part in the workshop
and contributing to the useful deliberations. She promised to send the report of the workshop
soon to everybody and to take forward many of the suggestions that emerged in the discussions
on behalf of the organizers.
“Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture:
Whither Indian Farmer?”
Organised by Centre for Sustainable Agriculture [CSA]
&
Centre for World Solidarity [CWS]
(at Hotel Sai Prakash, Nampally Station Road, Hyderabad)

December 8th and 9th, 2006: PROGRAMME

107
 Day 1: December 8th 2006

Registration of participants & Round of Introductions

Introduction to the Workshop: Dr Uma Shankari, Sociologist

The KIA proposals – a brief overview: Ms Kavitha Kuruganti, Centre for

Sustainable Agriculture
Panel Discussion:
“Need For, and Implications of the KIA, drawing lessons from the
Green Revolution”
In the Chair: Shri M V Sastri, Convenor, Centre for World Solidarity

“Similarities and differences between Indian and American farming – need for
the KIA” : Shri Devinder Sharma, Agriculture policy analyst

“The Green Revolution & its aftermath – Indian agriculture at a crossroads” :

Shri Bhaskar Save, Organic Farming activist

“Green Revolution – Lessons for any future Green Revolution from a Science
Studies perspective” : Dr Shiv Viswanathan, Sociologist and Science
Studies scholar

Discussion on the Panel presentation & Concluding remarks of the Chair

Theme 1 of KIA: HRD & Institutional Capacity Building (Agri-

Research & Education)
In the Chair: Dr M S Chari, Ex-Director, Central Tobacco Research
Institute

“Agricultural Education & Research in India – Implications of the KIA

proposals” : Dr J Venkateswarlu, Agriculture Scientist and ex-
Director, Central Arid Zone Research Institute

“Agriculture Research in India – Farmers’ knowledge and needs” : Shri Jacob

Nellithanam, Richharia Campaign

“Innovative Indo-US Collaborations – Missed Opportunities” :Dr Shambu

Prasad, Science Policy Expert, XIM-Bhubaneswar

DISCUSSIONS & CHAIR’S CONCLUDING REMARKS

 Day 2: December 9th 2006

Welcome & Quick recap of earlier day’s discussions: Ms Usha Jayakumar,

Thanal
Theme 2 of KIA: Emerging Technologies, including Transgenic
Agriculture
In the Chair: Shri Vijay Jawandhia, Shetkari Sanghatan
“Transgenic Agriculture and Indian Agriculture – experience so far &
implications of KIA proposals on farmers” : Dr G V Ramanjaneyulu,
Centre for Sustainable Agriculture
“Emerging Technologies – IPR implications” : Dr Bala Ravi, MSSRF,
Chennai
DISCUSSIONS & CHAIR’S CONCLUDING REMARKS
Theme 3 of KIA: Agri Processing & Marketing (Food Processing,
Byproduct Utilisation, Biofuels)
In the Chair: Dr A Prasada Rao, Agriculture Scientist and Central
Committee Member, AP Rythu Sangam
“Biofuels Vs. Food – KIA proposals and implications”:Shri G
Ananthapadmanabhan, Executive Director, Greenpeace India
“Implications of KIA proposals on farmers in the sphere of Marketing” : Dr V
Sobhanadeeswar Rao, Ex-Minister for Agriculture, Govt of Andhra
Pradesh
DISCUSSIONS & CHAIR’S CONCLUDING REMARKS
Theme 4 of KIA: Natural Resource Management, Esp. Water
ManagementIn the Chair: Dr Rukmini Rao, Gramya Resource Centre
for Women
“The proposals on Water Management in KIA, Need & Implications, Progress
so far”:Dr Ramakrishna, Director, Central Research Institute for
Dryland Agriculture [CRIDA]
“Drought Proofing & Indian agriculture – KIA’s relevance & implications” :Shri
Udaya Shankar, Advisor-NRM, Centre for World Solidarity
DISCUSSIONS & CHAIR’S CONCLUDING REMARKS
Closing Session of the Workshop - OPEN HOUSEIn the Chair: Dr N K
Sanghi, Agriculture Scientist & Ex-Director-NRM, MANAGE

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Chairpersons & Speakers in the workshop, session-by-session

Dr Uma Shankari – A sociologist by training, Dr Uma Shankari is an expert on traditional

tank irrigation systems. She is a practicing farmer and is associated with National Alliance for
People’s Movements, specifically on their ‘Krishi Bachao, Desh Bachao’ campaign. Also part
of the Rashtriya Rythu Seva Samithi. She was the one who gave an apt title to the workshop
and is part of the Organising Committee of the workshop.

Ms Kavitha Kuruganti – A Development Communicator by training, she has been working

on the issue of sustainable agriculture for more than thirteen years now. Has been involved
in grassroots work on food security, seed diversity revival, non-chemical farming and is also
experienced in policy-influencing work on a variety of issues pertaining to agriculture. Has
been advocating for a farmer-centric, farmer-led agriculture research system in addition to
farmer-friendly policies related to agriculture. Campaigns against hazardous agricultural
technologies have included work on pesticides and Genetic Engineering in agriculture.
Currently associated with the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture.

Mr M V Sastri – The Convenor of Centre for World Solidarity, known for his pro-poor, pro-
people vision on a variety of issues pertaining to development. Has been instrumental in
setting up many well-known institutions as spin-offs from Centre for World Solidarity’s work,
focusing on specific issues like watersheds, sustainable agriculture, forestry, local self
governance, dalit rights etc. Been associated for a long time with the human rights movement
in the country. An economist by training, he is on the Governing Board of several
organizations, helping them in being effective in their work. An inspiration and a constant
support to many civil society groups especially in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

Mr Devinder Sharma – An Agriculture Scientist by training from Palampur. Has seen the
Green Revolution in his homeland of Punjab in close quarters, as it unfolded and in its
aftermath. After a long stint as an agriculture journalist, he is now known to the world as a
prolific writer and a policy analyst watching closely various moves of the government related
to agriculture. Known to the civil society groups all over as the person who enables them to
understand the implications of all of this on farmers, especially poor and marginal farmers of
the country. Been instrumental in the qualified progressive stand taken by the Indian
government on Agreement on Agriculture now and then. Always helpful to come and meet
with farmers and NGOs and spend time with them even as he spends time with the heads of
governments in various countries. An analyst that Tony Blair chose to meet before the
Seattle Round of the WTO, hearing he was in the UK!

Mr Bhaskar Save – his 14 acre farm called Kalpavruksh has been visited by many – ones
inspired by him as well as ones who are skeptical. Every one went back impressed, going by
the visitors’ remarks in his guest book – his farm house is apparently well named – it is
indeed a Kalpavruksha. He is not just an organic farmer but a natural, do-little farmer! He
had incidentally received many prizes like the President’s Award, which means that even by
the parameters of productivity that intensive agriculture proponents adopt, his farm fares
the best! He had seen the destruction that the green revolution had wrought all around
him, not just on farms in India but on almost all farmers of the country. In a style that is
unique, with his experience, intelligence, philosophy and knowledge, he is trying to persuade
policy-makers in creating a long term vision for Indian agriculture. His views as a practicing
farmer are most welcome and relevant in a debate of this kind and his continuing energetic
work in mobilizing others at 85 years of age is indeed very inspiring.
Dr Shiv Visvanathan – At present teaches at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information &
Communication Technology in Gujarat. An anthropologist earlier associated with Centre for
Study of Developing Societies [CSDS] in Delhi, he also taught at the Delhi School of
Economics. He specializes in Science, Technology & Society, a much neglected area of
specialization in India. Visvanathan has published three books and over 150 articles in various
journals and newspapers. His books include Organizing for Science (1985) Oxford University
Press, A Carnival for Science (1997) Oxford University Press; Foul Play: Chronicles of
Corruption 1947-1997 ( 1999) Banyan Books. Of specific relevance to this gathering are
his papers like “From the Green Revolution to the Ever Green Revolution – Studies in Discourse
Analysis” for an IDS seminar, “A Biotechnology Story – Notes from India” published in the
EPW in 2002. Argues that biotechnology is a key element of the wider drama of globalisation,
with the struggle between farmers and multinational companies. Has got his own views on
not just about policy formulation processes, as an STS expert but also on civil society’s
analysis and approach to issues such as the KIA.

Dr M S Chari: An entomologist by qualification and retired as the Director of Central Tobacco

Research Institute, an ICAR [Indian Council for Agricultural Research] institution. He was
also the Director-Research in the Gujarat Agricultural University. Is well known for his work
on Non Pesticidal Management [NPM]. An unusual agriculture scientist (that too, an
entomologist) who believed that farming is possible without synthetic pesticides and that
farmers’ livelihoods can be improved by promoting non-chemical farming. Worked with a
lot of civil society groups as part of Centre for World Solidarity and the Centre for Sustainable
Agriculture in promoting such approaches with farmers. He is the Managing Trustee of
Centre for Sustainable Agriculture at present. The work on NPM that he and other sensitive
scientists had begun in AP has now spread to around two lakh acres. Their work shows how
science can be more sensitively understood, re-formulated and put in the hands of farmers.

Dr J Venkateswarlu: A soil scientist by qualification. Had been with the NARS as the
Director of Central Arid Zone Research Institute [CAZRI] in Jodhpur. He was with CRIDA
before that. In recent times, has been focusing a lot on the neglected aspects of research
in the mainstream research establishment. He often talks about a phenomenon called TINA
[There Is No Alternative] syndrome of the NARS in India, which is to be blamed for much of
the problems emerging out of the agricultural research establishment in the country. One
of those rare agriculture scientists in India who is ready to say “we have been wrong in our
understanding”….
Mr Jacob Nellithanam: Is part of the Richharia Campaign from Chattisgarh. Dr Richharia’s
rich legacy needs very little introduction and Jacob was associated with the distinguished
agriculture scientist in his work related to conservation of indigenous germplasm. Work of
Dr Richharia and his associates is not just about the material legacy related to seed diversity,
but of attitude and orientation, to Indian agriculture, farmers’ knowledge and specifically
agriculture research. Jacob and his friends have been trying to protect the diversity that
indigenous communities have built over hundreds of years of farming – not just from a
technical point of view but because of a socio-political understanding of current day farming
and to uphold farmers’ apriori rights.

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Dr Shambu Prasad: With the Xavier’s Institute of Management in BBSR, teaching Rural
Development students on Natural Resource Management. With expertise in STS studies,
he had looked specifically at the handloom sector earlier and now, works on the issue of
technology in agriculture. Recent work includes work on watersheds, system of rice
intensification etc. He anchors a large civil society initiative that asserts the existence and
expertise in a knowledge domain that is often neglected, which is people’s knowledge. This
initiative is called Knowledge in Civil Society [KICS], which began in CWS and its sister
organizations and now spans the knowledge accumulated in civil society and people’s
organisations, across different sectors and across the country.

Mr Vijay Jawandhia: With Shetkari Sanghatan in Maharashtra, he is one of the most well-
known farmer leaders of India. Various farmers’ movements from Punjab to Tamil Nadu
recognize him as their own inspiring leader and his farmer-centric analysis has always provided
intellectual inputs to organized farmers’ organizations especially with regard to clarity about
their demands to the government. A farmer from Vidarbha, he has always had his ears
close to the ground and understood the real experiences of farmers clearly.

Dr G V Ramanjaneyulu: Executive Director of Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, a young

organization in Hyderabad. An agriculture scientist by training, he was with the Directorate
of Oilseeds Research for around a decade, before quitting and joining CSA. Known for his
deep commitment and concern for Indian farmers, he is seen as an ally from an otherwise
unfriendly world of agriculture scientists by many farmers’ organizations and people’s
movements – Today, CSA is proving with its work on the ground that alternatives are
indeed possible at a convincing scale and that agriculture scientists can take farmer-centric,
farmer-led approaches in their work.

Dr Bala Ravi: Currently, Advisor to the MSSRF on the issue of biodiversity. He was earlier
the Assistant Director General – IPRs in the Indian Council for Agriculture Research. His
commitment to Indian farmers is evident from the many opinion pieces that were published
on the recent legislative changes brought about in the arena of seeds, germplasm, IPRs
etc. His particular area of specialization – IPRs – is something that is often talked about by
even the establishment but not understood or worked out properly. His knowledge on the
subject of IPRs in particular has been very helpful to many civil society groups in formulating
their own responses including strategies, on the subject.

Dr Aribandi Prasada Rao: An agriculture scientist who taught in the Acharya N G Ranga
Agricultural University in Hyderabad before retiring. He provides intellectual analysis and
inputs to many farmers’ unions and movements and is the State Committee member of
the Andhra Pradesh Rythu Sangam. He is consulted by policy-makers and the media on
many issues pertaining to agriculture and his work on contract farming and APMC Act
amendments has been widely acknowledged.

Mr G Ananthapadmanabhan: Executive Director of Greenpeace India. Over the past

few years, Greenpeace has made its presence felt in India by some high-profile campaigns,
most notably related to GE in agriculture and ship-breaking and so on. An IIT-Chennai
Graduate by training, Ananth had spent a long stint of eleven years teaching secondary
school children environmental studies, before joining IDFC for a while. He headed Greenpeace
India right from its formation in India and has a deep commitment to the planet and all its
living organisms.

Mr Vadde Sobhanadeeswara Rao: He was the agriculture minister for Andhra Pradesh
during Chandrababu Naidu’s government here. Comes from an agricultural family himself
and was the agriculture minister when Bt Cotton was introduced in the state. Has boldly
stated long back that organic farming is a superior approach than transgenic agriculture, all
the more convinced after a visit to the US. He is known for his clear and bold analysis on
many issues, communicated through many opinion pieces which have furthered debates
on agriculture in the state of AP.

Dr V Rukmini Rao: A well known women’s rights activist. One of the Founder-Members of
Saheli in Delhi, she was closely involved with the women’s movement in India. She is at
present the Managing Trustee of Centre for Sustainable Agriculture. Also the Secretary of
Gramya Resource Centre for Women which works on rights of girl children and women,
especially in the case of tribal communities like the Lambadas. Well respected in the civil
society for her understanding of development issues, she is also experienced in matters
related to Natural Resource Management.

Dr Y V Ramakrishna: The Director of Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture

[CRIDA] in Hyderabad, Dr Ramakrishna is an agricultural metereologist. He is the only senior
person from the agriculture research establishment, who has also been involved in the
formulation of the KIA, who has agreed to take part in this workshop organized by civil
society groups. The other agricultural scientists invited for the purpose had chosen to stay
away or drop out at the last minute. CRIDA is at present engaged with several research and
livelihoods-related projects in partnership with civil society groups.

Mr Udaya Shankar: Was with AFPRO for many years. Right now is an Advisor on Natural
Resource Management for Centre for World Solidarity. Been a trainer for many civil society
groups on issues of water management, food security etc. Has vast amount of experience
on participatory watershed development and on community-based approaches to water
management.

Dr N K Sanghi: A people’s scientist, Dr Sanghi is at present associated with many civil

society groups like WASSAN and Centre for Sustainable Agriculture in a variety of roles. A
Breeder by training, Dr Sanghi retired as the Director – Natural Resource Management in
MANAGE. He was also the Zonal Coordinator in the ICAR for the South Zone before that
and many civil society groups especially in Andhra Pradesh remember him for his pro-
farmer approaches. Known for his passion for bottom-up and community-driven processes
for livelihood improvement, Dr Sanghi always has a listening ear – willing to listen to the
farmers, the NGOs and their frontline workers and sensitive agriculture scientists, a rarity
amongst agriculture scientists.

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