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Prof. K C Bansal, Secretary, National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, New Delhi, and Former Director, National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (ICAR), New Delhi
For a country like India, ensuring sustainable food security in a rapidly changing climate is a significant concern today. With the slow pace of yield increase, it is crucial to accelerate the genetic improvement of crops for enhancing food production and achieving self-sufficiency. The rapid adoption of science-based technologies for crop improvement, such as GM crops and gene-edited crops are likely to play major roles.
Science-based advancements of breeding technologies continue to dominate global agriculture, playing a crucial role in increasing food production. While conventional plant breeding has historically made significant contributions and continues to do so, plant genetic engineering has emerged as a powerful modern tool for crop improvement. Since 1996, several genetically modified (GM) crops with improved traits have been developed, and they have been widely adopted globally. Currently, they are grown in over 190 million hectares across 30 countries, including India. This makes plant genetic engineering the fastest-adopted technology in the history of modern agriculture. Furthermore, GM crops and their derived products have been used as food or feed in more than 70 countries over the last 25 years, demonstrating their safety to humans, animals and the environment.
In India, Bt cotton was the first GM crop to be commercialised in 2002, and its impact has been viewed as a great success story globally. Two decades later, in 2022, GM mustard hybrid DMH-11 and its parental lines were environmentally released in India, and genome editing was exempted in plants from biosafety assessment for crop improvement. These two modern science-based developments occurred in the interest of farmers and the national economy.
GM Mustard
In the mid-1960s, India experienced a Green Revolution that resulted in a significant increase in food production, from 50 million tonnes in 1950-51 to over 300 million tonnes in 2020-21. However, this progress was not replicated with any oilseed crop, which is urgently needed to meet our growing demands. Due to a serious deficit in domestic edible oil production, we heavily rely on imported edible oils. In 2020-21, India imported 13.35 million tonnes of edible oils at a cost of around Rs 117,000 crore. Nevertheless, the approval for the environmental release of GM mustard hybrid DMH 11, developed by a public sector institution in India, with approximately 28-30 per cent higher yield, is a significant step towards reducing our dependence on imports.
Mustard is predominantly a self-pollinating crop, making it difficult to develop high-yielding hybrids by crossing two diverse parental lines. To facilitate cross-pollination, a robust system has been developed in India using two transgenes: the barnase gene for male sterility (MS) and the barstar gene for the restoration of male fertility (RF). Hybrid seeds are produced by crossing the MS and RF lines. This two-gene system is also used worldwide in rapeseed, a sister crop of mustard, to develop GM hybrids that farmers grow on a large scale for higher yields.
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