ABM Briefing: India's First Genome-Edited Rice
The launch of India's first Genome-Edited Rice understandably has attracted blind praise and mindless dismissal. Shall we examine the facts and put things in perspective?
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Many moons ago, Bill Gates courted controversy when he mentioned in a podcast that India is a “kind of laboratory to try things”. He further added that “when you prove them out in India, you can take to other places”.
He stated this in response to Reid Hoffman's question, "Where do you see progress and momentum outside your Industry that inspires you?"With his naive view of Impact1 and the ongoing Impact-Middlemen2 work happening under Gates Ag One in South Asia and Africa since 2020, his strategy pronouncements have been been consistent over the years, despite all the reading and travels he documents in Gates Notes.
And so whenever Bill Gates makes a trip to India, his ‘third visit in three years’, I am left mildly amused for his industrious proclivity to get terminally stuck in techno-utopian wonderlands that conveniently sweep under the carpet the wicked questions underpinning agriculture, health and nutrition.
I am also left wondering: What next experiment Bill is going to influence in India’s complex agrarian landscape? The clues were evident when Bill met India’s Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on March 17th 2025.
Especially in the backdrop of Gates Foundation supporting ICAR and IRRI with grants for making staple varieties adaptable to climate stresses from production standpoint and biofortify them from consumption standpoint.3
Since 2011, the Gates Foundation has been actively funding field trials of CRISPR-edited rice in India. The foundation's approach involves supporting projects that have shown promising results in laboratory settings or small-scale field tests, subsequently funding larger-scale pilots in real-world conditions in developing countries.
In October 2023, the Gates Foundation awarded an $8 million grant to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) to accelerate genetic improvements in rice for farmers in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. This grant focuses on applying innovative, genomics-driven approaches to enhance rice varieties' adaptability to climate change. The cat was out of the bag on May 5 when Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced the launch of India’s first Genome-Edited (GE) Rice- DRR Rice 100 (Kamala) and Pusa DST Rice 1 varieties.
If you’ve been reading Agribusiness Matters, you would know that I was the first to write about DRR 100 (Kamala) variant in August 2024 after my interactions with Satendra and other researchers from IRRI who had come up with targeted genome editing of the OsCKX2 gene to improve grain yield.
The May 5th event also commemorated the launch of “Minus 5 and Plus 10” formula by Shivraj Singh Chouhan, aimed at addressing the perplexing problem of Indian farmers getting terminally stuck in the rice and wheat hamster wheel.
The calculus of expectations underneath these launches is that such innovations could help reduce the area under rice cultivation by five million hectares while increasing rice output by ten million tonnes in the same area. If all goes as per plan, this could free up land for the cultivation of pulses and oilseeds, thereby improving India’s nutritional security and minimizing import dependency.
The operating word is “If all goes per plan.” This mountain of expectations is taller than Mount Everest, especially in a country like India where extension services infrastructure is broken (far below the recommended 1:750 agent-to-farmer ratio4) leading to mismanagement of expectations and incentives when a new technology enters a complex agrarian market with a complicated regulatory landscape. What happened with Bt Cotton during the time of its commercialization is a classic case in point.5
Although every explainer surrounding the Genome-Edited Rice have underlined the fact that they are not GM Crops, the regulatory process to approve the genome-edited rice followed the similar playbook that was followed earlier with the launch of GM Mustard in India.
