Fourteen years after US multinational Monsanto brought the genetically modified (GM) Bt Cotton (Bollgard) to India, there is no clarity on the discovery having ever been patented in the country. Clueless Indian farmers and seed manufacturers have paid crores as royalty to the company from 2002 until 2006, when the company came out with Bollgard 2, which was, incidentally, patented.
Two arms of the central government differ on the patent issue. The Central Institute of Cotton Research (CICR), in an RTI reply to farm activist Vijay Jawandhia, emphatically stated that Monsanto’s ‘cry1ac Mon 531’ gene was never patented in India. However, the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) wrote to him that the Bt seed developed by University of Agriculture Sciences (Dharwad), which was found to contain the Mon 531 strain, “cannot be launched in the market” due to a “patent violation”. It did not specify who held the patent.
Queries to Monsanto specifically on the patent issue were avoided. “Monsanto has proprietary rights in its regulatory data as well as its biological materials, trade secrets and know-how, which are also protected under Indian law. The Mon 531 is subject to such rights,” said a company spokesperson and never got back on a query seeking the patent number.
A senior official in the ministry of commerce handling intellectual property affairs trashed the proprietary theory. “Either there is a patent or not, there is nothing like a proprietary right. A company can protect its trade secret in other countries but there is no such law in India,” he said.
TOI’s independent search for the patent on the Mon 531 gene also drew a blank. The Patent Information System office, which is the only storehouse of all patented documents in India, is located in Nagpur. For a fee of Rs250 per hour, an assisted search can be conducted for any patent.