Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan has sent a legal notice to Union Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan asking for a freeze on all genetically modified organisms, including field trials.
Though growing Bt brinjal is illegal in India, Mr. Bhushan’s letter comes in the aftermath of activist groups recently proffering evidence of Bt Brinjal, a GM crop, being grown in a farmer’s field in Haryana.
Mr. Bhushan’s letter demands that the Environment Ministry “…uproot and destroy planted Bt brinjal in farms and seedlings in nurseries, undertake a scaled-up exercise of testing of seeds and plantings (for the presence of Bt genes) and, ascertain the supply chain - from seed developers to intermediaries.”
Developed by the Maharashtra-based seed company, Mahyco, Bt brinjal was the first food crop made to contain an insecticidal protein, called cry1 ac, sourced from the genes of the soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringienesis .
Though this was cleared for commercial cultivation it was put in deep-freeze, by former Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh in 2010 on the grounds that there was scientific and public disagreement on its safety.
No action taken
Mr. Bhushan’s Sunday letter also contains a lab report, prepared by a private biotechnology firm, that confirmed the presence of the Bt-derived protein in brinjal samples from Fatehabad, Haryana, in April. The GEAC was apprised of this but no action had been forthcoming so far, the letter claims
The lab report was also sent to the Haryana government, which picked up samples of the suspected Bt Brinjal crop and sent it to the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR) in New Delhi for testing. The complete report and decision hasn’t been made public so far.
Following brinjal, a genetically modified strain of mustard too is in the regulatory pipeline. While this was cleared in May 2017, a GEAC panel changed tack and ruled that more tests were required before the mustard could be made available in farmer fields.
