Top points to Samar Halarnkar who has the case for and against BT Brinjal clearly cut out in the Hindustan Times. Cogent, balanced and everything you need to know and understand about why Bt Brinjal has everyone — Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, environmentalists, NGOs, farmers and scientists — so worked up.
In 1997, in a field outside Delhi, government regulators forced scientists at the State-run Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) to destroy India’s first field of locally designed killer brinjals (aubergines or eggplants to the rest of the world).
India is littered with State institutions that fail their purpose or flatly refuse to crack down on erring colleagues, so the 1997 move against the government-grown brinjals was extraordinary. These were no ordinary brinjals. In the invisible reaches of their DNA, scientists had spliced in a gene that let the brinjals kill a caterpillar, which bores holes into it and forces farmers to use costly and poisonous pesticides. But the IARI scientists lost their field of dreams because they had not followed some of the safety procedures required. more
And from the Indian Express:
Bt brinjal is on indefinite hold because the Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, has said there are many questions still to be answered. But the fact is there are many questions the minister needs to answer. We look at the Bt brinjal story from the day Ramesh took charge as Environment Minister, we assess the procedural changes he put in place, and we examine his argument that research in food science is best left to the public sector. As much as the decision he took, it’s also how he came to that decision that has raised troubling issues. More:
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