New BT Brinjal panel has conflict of interest: NGOs

Seven of the 16 members expert panel to examine new safety standards for BT Brinial, on which moratorium was imposed in February 2010, had a role to play in giving approval to India's first genetically modified food crop BT Brinjal.

Updated on: Apr 26, 2011, 24:51:26 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Seven of the 16 members expert panel to examine new safety standards for BT Brinial, on which moratorium was imposed in February 2010, had a role to play in giving approval to India's first genetically modified food crop BT Brinjal.

The panel has national advisory council member Madhav Gadgil, PM Bhargava, an independent GM expert,G Padmanabhan, Emeritus professor at Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore, and Bala Prasad, chief executive officer of National Medicinal Plants Board as members.

MS Swaminathan of Swaminathan Foundation and Raghavendra Gadagkar of Indian Institute of Sciences have declined to be members of the expert panel. Swaminathan Foundation has developed a GM rice variety.

However, seven other members of the panel have either been part of the Genetically Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), India's GM regulator, or had been with institutes involved in developing BT Brinjal.

One such member Keshav R Kranthi, director of Central Institute for Cotton Research of Nagpur was pulled up at the last GEAC meeting for allowing unauthorised trail of a cotton variety with a new BT Cotton variety. There have been reports that institutes, headed by another member, had got funds from GM companies.

"It is a case of direct conflict of interest," said Kavita Kuruganti of Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture. "They have earlier termed BT Brinjal safe and now they will be analysing new safety procedures for the GM food crop".

The clear terms of reference of the expert panel is to examine new safety standards for BT Brinjal, on which environment minister Jairam Ramesh had imposed a moratorium. The first meeting of the expert panel is slated for April 27. Some national and international literature has been generated on the safety of GM foods and recently Indian Science Academy's committee has deliberated on future of GM food crops in India.

The committee had recommended lifting of moratorium on BT Brinjal which was debunked after civil society members pointed out that some parts of the reports were lifted from the literature generated by GM food production companies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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