The Indian Express in an editorial in the 2 August edition, welcomes the collaboration between RiceTec of the United States and Mahyco, a Maharashtra-based seed company to promote direct-seeded rice and zero-tillage wheat cultivation, primarily in Punjab. Direct-seeding requires less water than transplanted rice but has to contend with weeds, which flooded water suppresses in paddies. RiceTec, whose local subsidiary is Savannah Seeds, has developed a technology that allows rice to survive the spraying of the herbicide Imazethapyr meant to kill weeds. The technology was developed through conventional mutation breeding. Ajai Rana, the founder and CEO of Savannah Seeds had told this website’s editor, Vivian Fernandes, in an interview that the technology has been in use in the US for more than 20 years. Zero-tillage enables wheat to be sown in combine harvested rice fields without burning straw. This cropping system is recommended for Punjab where rice and wheat are intensively grown, year after year. If a mungbean crop is grown after wheat, the soil will be nourished with nitrogen, which the mungbean plants absorb from air and store in root nodules.
The Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) has also developed basmati rice resistant to Imazethapyr. The National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack has transferred the trait to common rice varieties. Their technology is different from that of RiceTec.
Indian Express says private companies had introduced new technologies after economic liberalisation in the 1990s like high-yielding hybrid vegetable seeds, single-cross maize hybrids, Bt cotton genetically-engineered to be resistant to bollworms, tissue culture, dense planting of fruit trees, drip irrigation and so on. Private companies like Venky’s and Sugana have also crafted the poultry revolution. But in the past decade there has been a pause because of the collapse of commodity prices since 2013-14 and opposition from environmental activists and politically influential groups like the Swadeshi Jagran Manch to new crop technologies.
(Top photo of conventional transplanting by Vivian Fernandes)
