The public sector institutions for science and technology are one of the two institutions in which Indians have great faith. The other one is judiciary. It is this faith in the science and technology institutions that the government is now exploiting to push genetically modified (GM) crops into the country.
This is not news for some of us who have been working on this issue for quite some time. But the Inter- Academy of Sciences, constituted by Jairam Ramesh to give recommendations on GM crops for India, shocked us out of our wits. The Inter-Academy, which consists of 6 national academies of science – the Indian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian National Academy of Engineering, the Indian Academy of Medical Science, National Academy of Agriculture Sciences, was given this task following the moratorium on Bt Brinjal. This moratorium was declared after national level public consultations on Bt brinjal showed tremendous opposition from a large cross section of the society.
The Inter-Academy group is supposed to have finished their report and submitted it to the government. While no trace of the report could be found on these respective academy websites, it has been reported by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), the lobby group funded by multinational biotech seed companies.
We happened to get a copy of the report from a scientist friend and what we saw there was the most unscientific report that one can ever imagine. It has no referencing to start with. It is full of sweeping statements and is more of a political position of certain sections of the scientific communities who promote GM crops.
It also comes across as a serious case of plagiarism. A large portion of its section on Bt brinjal is a straight lift from an article by Dr Anandkumar in Bio-tech News, a publication of the Department of Biotechnology. Dr Anandkumar is a Bt brinjal developer himself. Apart from this, the academies have unashamedly taken figures from ISAAA reports without mentioning the source.
They have done everything they could to paint a rosy picture of GM crops. There was not a single mention of the peer reviewed scientific papers on the health and environmental impacts of GM crops. Apart from the fact that there is no ‘terms of reference’ clearly stated, there is also no mention of the process that these esteemed academies put in place to review one of the most serious issues affecting our food safety as individuals and food security as a nation. There is also serious conflict of interests as Dr Ashis Dutta one of the scientists who has signed off the report is a GM crop developer himself.
So basically the government asked the fox to guard the chicken coop. One shouldn’t be surprised at the outcome, but the degree of shoddiness of the report puts every scientist represented by these academies to shame.
As citizens of this country we should be worried because a corrupted scientific community is the greatest danger to our country and human society at large. To regain faith on science we must disown such scientists and scientific institutions.
-Rajesh Krishnan
Sustainable Agriculture
Campaign manager
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