India eases stance on GM crop trials

Five years ago, India was a hostile place for researchers testing genetically modified (GM) crops. Its government barred the commercial planting of a transgenic aubergine (a vegetable locally known as brinjal) after protests from anti-GM activists. 

Then it gave state governments the power to veto transgenic-crop field trials. The result: an effective moratorium on such trials. “We felt as if we had come up against a brick wall, and might as well chuck it in and do something else,” says molecular biologist Bharat Char, who works for Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco).

But under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, voted into power a year ago, India has quietly changed course on GM field testing. In the past year, eight Indian states largely aligned with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party have approved field trials of GM crops, between them allowing tests that include transgenic rice, cotton, maize (corn), mustard, brinjal and chickpea, according to documents seen by Nature journal.

“There is no better feeling than to know that your technology is performing in the field,” says Char, who himself planted salt-tolerant GM rice in Maharashtra state in January.

The relaxed attitude to GM crop trials is not only reviving the enthusiasm of Indian biotech researchers — it will also be keenly watched around the world, says Dominic Glover, an agricultural socio-economist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. “India’s attitude towards transgenic crops has a symbolic importance beyond its borders,” he says, because it epitomizes tensions that surround the use of GM technology in developing nations.