India's Cotton Industry Struggles: Aversion to Science & Technology
2025-03-29 10:56:42
Why India lagged behind in the cotton race – Aversion to science and technology
In 1853, Karl Marx famously wrote about how British rule had “broken the Indian handloom and destroyed the spinning wheel”, priced its textiles out of the European market, “brought the twist to Hindustan” and finally “flooded the motherland of cotton with cotton”. Something similar has happened to Indian cotton over the past decade or so. However, in this case it was not due to some grand imperialist scheme, but due to pure domestic policy paralysis and ineptitude.
Consider the following: Between 2002-03 and 2013-14, India’s cotton production nearly tripled from 13.6 million to 39.8 million bales (MB; 1 bale = 170 kg). During the three marketing years (October-September) ending 2002-03, its average imports were 2.2 mb which was not even 0.1 mb more than exports. This changed completely in the three years ending 2013-14, with imports falling by half to 1.1 mb and exports increasing a hundredfold to 11.6 mb. India’s production is projected to be 29.5 mb in 2024-25, the lowest since 29 mb in 2008-09. Also, imports at 3 mb will surpass exports of 1.7 mb. In short, we have become a net importer of the natural fibre. A country that had become the world’s No. 1 producer in 2015-16 and the second-largest exporter to the US by 2011-12 is today “inundated” by American, Australian, Egyptian and Brazilian cotton. How did India become a major producer and exporter of cotton? The answer is technology. India has some of the best cotton breeders.
This tradition of openness to new technologies and breeding innovations also enabled the commercialisation of genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton hybrids in India. The first of these – incorporating genes isolated from the soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, producing a protein toxic to the deadly American bollworm pest – was planted from the 2002-03 crop season. This was followed four years later by second-generation GM hybrids based on Bollgard-II technology, deploying two Bt genes to provide protection against the Spodoptera cotton leafworm pest.
The widespread adoption of Bt cotton – covering nearly 95 per cent of the country’s total 12 million hectares of cotton cultivation by 2013-14 – led to a second revolution of the fibre: if H-4, Varalakshmi and other hybrids helped double the national average lint yield from 127 kg to 302 kg per hectare between 1970-71 and 2002-03, Bollgard raised it to 566 kg by 2013-14.
It is not just cotton or Monsanto-Bayer’s GM technologies that are suffering. Other GM crops and even indigenously developed transgenic crops — from Delhi University’s hybrid mustard and cotton claimed to have higher levels of Bt “Cry1Ac” protein expression than Bollgard, to the Lucknow-based National Botanical Research Institute’s whitefly and pink bollworm resistant cotton — have struggled to cross regulatory hurdles, ostensibly designed to protect the country’s agriculture from “risks” posed by their release.
