Somewhere in central India, sometime around the summer of 2014, a pink bollworm caterpillar swallowed two of the most carefully engineered proteins in the history of Indian agriculture, and survived.
No one was watching. The moment was not recorded by any laboratory in Nagpur or Hyderabad, did not appear in any agricultural bulletin, and did not announce itself to the country’s regulators.
It happened the way most evolutionary turning points happen, which is silently, microscopically, and inside the gut of a single insect that did not know it was making history.
In the cells of the caterpillar’s digestive lining, two molecular handshakes that should have closed did not.
Cry1Ac and Cry2Ab, the proteins engineered into every cell of India’s flagship genetically modified cotton, Bt cotton, slid past the receptors they were meant to bind to, and dissolved harmlessly.
The caterpillar finished its meal. It pupated. It emerged as a moth. It mated. It laid eggs.
Inside those eggs, the next generation of Pectinophora gossypiella carried a gut chemistry slightly different from that of every pink bollworm before it. The toxin had stopped working.
The technology, 12 years after India had approved it, had begun to lose ground to the insect it was built to kill.
The Union Cabinet’s approval of a Rs 5,659.22 crore Mission for Cotton Productivity on May 6 is being described in policy circles as a scientific reboot. A pivot from Bt to high-density planting and climate-resilient seeds.
But beneath the choreography of the announcement lies a sharper question, the one scientists returned to without prompting.
Did Bt cotton fail in India, or did India fail Bt cotton?
The answer, as the scientists tell it, sits closer to the second than the public conversation has been willing to admit.
And while the moth was evolving for 20 years, the laboratories that should have been keeping pace with it were waiting for a signature that never came.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF A BIOLOGICAL MIRACLE
To understand how completely India is now stranded, it helps to remember how startlingly elegant the original idea was.
Bacillus thuringiensis is a soil bacterium that produces a family of crystalline proteins called Cry toxins.
When a caterpillar swallows the protein, the alkaline environment of its midgut activates it, and the toxin binds to receptors lining the gut wall. The binding assembles a pore. The pore ruptures the gut lining.
The caterpillar stops feeding, and dies within days. The mode of action is described in detail in a 2011 paper published in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews.
The architecture is exquisitely specific. The receptor that Cry1Ac binds to does not exist in human, mammalian, or avian guts.
The protein moves harmlessly through anything that is not a target lepidopteran caterpillar, the larval stage of any insect from the order Lepidoptera, which is the scientific family that includes all butterflies and moths. It is this worm-like, leaf-eating young form, not the adult moth, that actually damages cotton crops.
To Indian and American scientists in the 1990s, sitting with the gene that produces this protein in front of them, the proposition was almost theatrical in its simplicity. Take the gene. Insert it into a cotton plant. Let the plant become its own insecticide factory.
When the engineered cotton was first commercialised in India under the trade name Bollgard-I in 2002, the result was very nearly what the design predicted.
Pink bollworm and American bollworm populations collapsed. Pesticide spraying fell by roughly half in the first five years of adoption, a reduction documented in peer-reviewed work published in PLOS ONE in 2012. Yields rose.
Professor KC Bansal, former Director of the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources and one of India’s most experienced voices on agricultural biotechnology, is unequivocal about that first decade.
“The science behind Bt cotton was not fundamentally wrong,” Professor Bansal tells IndiaToday.in. “In fact, Bt cotton initially worked remarkably well in India. It significantly reduced damage from bollworms, lowered insecticide use, and increased yields. With the advent of Bt cotton in India, the production increased from about 15 million bales in 2002-03 to about 40 million bales in 2014-15.”
Watch this Kisan Tak podcast with Professor KC Bansal:
A bale is the standard unit in which cotton is traded. In India, one bale equals 170 kilograms of cleaned, ginned cotton fibre, roughly enough to make 400 simple cotton shirts.
“Importantly, Bt cotton should be viewed, in my opinion, as a success story,” Professor Bansal says. “It has delivered substantial benefits for many years. But we need continuous innovation, regular resistance monitoring, and integrated pest management.”
A single decade of Bt cotton, according to the Cotton Association of India, produced more lint, or soft cotton cloth, than the previous three decades combined.
By 2013-14, Indian production touched 398 lakh bales, the highest in the country’s history. India became the second-largest cotton producer in the world, behind only China.
Dr YG Prasad, former Director of ICAR-CICR Nagpur, who led the institute through the years of the Bt collapse, frames the scale of what was achieved in his own measured way.
“The introduction of Bt cotton led to a surge in area, which crossed 13 million hectares by 2019-20, with production reaching 360 lakh bales,” Dr Prasad tells IndiaToday.in. “The perceived success of Bt cotton encouraged the spread of long-duration hybrids even into marginal soils, where they were often a misfit.”
And then, almost imperceptibly, the curve broke.
THE HYBRID THAT SET A TRAP
When the history of Indian cotton is eventually written, one early decision will likely be marked as the point at which the country quietly engineered its own setback.
It is the decision to deploy Bt cotton almost exclusively inside hybrid varieties, rather than inside pure-line, open-pollinated varieties.
The decision was made at the very start of India’s Bt cotton journey in March 2002, when the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee cleared the first three Bollgard-I cotton hybrids for commercial cultivation.
These were Mech-12 Bt, Mech-162 Bt and Mech-184 Bt, all developed by Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech, the Indian joint venture between Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company and the American agri-biotech giant Monsanto.
The company had licensed the Cry1Ac gene into three of Mahyco’s existing high-yielding Indian hybrid backgrounds, locking Bt technology into the hybrid format from day one because that was the only form in which the licencing companies offered it.
A hybrid is the first-generation product of a deliberate cross between two genetically distinct parent lines. It produces hybrid vigour, larger plants, more bolls, and higher yields in the first generation.
But the seed from a hybrid plant does not breed true. Every season, the farmer must buy fresh hybrid seed at premium prices.
Varietal cotton, also called open-pollinated cotton, is grown from pure-line seeds that breed true. A farmer can save seeds from one harvest, replant them the following season, and still get the same plant.
In every other major cotton-producing country, including the United States, China, Brazil, and Australia, Bt traits were transferred into varietal cotton. India, almost alone, chose hybrids.
“Cotton hybrids are grown in India because they provide a better fit in the rainfed growing conditions in central and southern regions,” Dr Paresh Verma, Director General of the Federation of Seed Industry of India tells IndiaToday.in.
The choice had a hidden biological cost. Indian hybrid cotton plants typically grow for 170 days or more. The pure-line varieties grown elsewhere finish in 150 days or less. The longer the plant stays in the field, the longer the pink bollworm has to feed, breed, and pass on whatever mutations help it survive the toxin.
India built a longer dinner table for the moth, and then served it the same meal every night.
Dr Prasad explains why the world’s other major cotton growers settled on a different model. “World over, in all major cotton-producing countries, cotton cultivation relies on compact varieties, not hybrids, which are of 150 days shorter duration sown under a high-density planting pattern,” he says.
“The shorter duration cotton varieties used in the USA, Australia and Brazil produce superior, long staple fibre primarily for export purposes. In India as well, most of the popular commercial hirsutum hybrids grown are of superior, medium to long staple types. However, these hybrids are not ideally suited to a high-density planting system and are of 170 days duration,” he adds.
Hirsutum hybrids are cotton plants bred from Gossypium hirsutum, the long-staple American cotton species that now dominates Indian fields, by crossing two genetically distinct parent lines of the same species to produce a first-generation crop that gives higher yields, longer and finer fibres, and better suitability for modern textile mills.
The seeds from these plants, however, do not breed true, which is why farmers must buy fresh hybrid seed every season.
The intended firewall against resistance was a strategy called high-dose-refuge. The principle is mathematically clean. Bt cotton produces enough toxin to kill 99.99 per cent of susceptible larvae that feed on it.
The rare survivors carry resistance mutations. If those rare resistant moths mate with abundant susceptible ones, their offspring inherit only one copy of the resistance gene, and are still killed by the high dose of toxin in the plant.
The theoretical basis was laid out in a foundational Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published in 1998.
For this to work, susceptible moths must be available. Indian farmers were therefore instructed to plant a border of non-Bt cotton, roughly 20 per cent of every field, where bollworms could live and breed normally and produce a steady supply of susceptible insects each season.
The strategy collapsed almost immediately.
“The refuge strategy for Bt cotton was scientifically sound in principle,” Professor Bansal says. “But farmer compliance was weak, mainly due to Bt seed being expensive, landholdings often being very small, and giving up part of the field for non-Bt cotton appearing economically unattractive. Even though the science was correct, the deployment model was not sufficiently adapted to Indian ground realities.”
Professor Bansal is equally honest about the broader scientific drift that followed.
“While Bt cotton was highly successful initially, over time it became the dominant technology,” he says.
“Integrated pest management and diversified control strategies did not keep pace. The same Bt proteins were repeatedly deployed without sufficient diversification. Secondary pests that were not controlled by Bt began emerging in some regions. Climate and agronomic factors affected cotton productivity independently of Bt technology,” Professor Bansal explains.
A smallholder with two hectares of land was being asked to deliberately sacrifice a fifth of his crop to non-Bt cotton, in order to feed the pest he was paying to kill. He did not do it.
The agricultural extension system, the network of state-run training and outreach programmes that was supposed to teach him why he should, never reached most of him.
By the time companies began packaging the refuge seed inside the same bag as the Bt seed in a system called Refuge-In-Bag, several generations of pink bollworm had already begun developing resistance.
Refuge seed refers to non-Bt plant seeds that are mixed with or planted alongside genetically modified insect-resistant seeds to provide a habitat where pests can survive without developing resistance to the plant toxins.
A 2025 paper published in Scientific Reports, authored by scientists at the Central Institute for Cotton Research in Nagpur, documented field populations of pink bollworm in central India that survived doses of both Cry1Ac and Cry2Ab combined, the dual toxins inside the upgraded Bollgard-II.
Bollgard-I uses only the Cry1Ac protein as a single line of defence against specific pests like the American, spotted, and pink bollworms.
Bollgard-II adds the Cry2Ab protein to create a dual-layered shield that makes it significantly harder for insects to develop resistance. Two walls had fallen, not one. Earlier evidence of pink bollworm resistance to Cry1Ac was published in PLOS ONE in 2010.
Watch this Kisan Tak podcast with Bhagirath Choudhary, Founder & Director of the South Asia Biotechnology Centre:
Professor Bansal traces what unfolded next with the patience of someone who watched it happen. “When the same Bt toxins were used continuously over millions of hectares year after year, the surviving insects gradually evolved resistance through natural selection,” he says. “This is similar to how bacteria develop antibiotic resistance.”
In Maharashtra, Telangana and Gujarat, where pink bollworm pressure has been heaviest, yields fell. In the northern zone of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, a different set of pests, whitefly, leaf hopper, and cotton leaf curl virus, took advantage of the weakened crop.
“The areas under cotton has declined by nearly 30 per cent in the northern states of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan in the last few years,” Dr Prasad says.
The Cotton Association of India data tell it plainly. Production fell from 398 lakh bales in 2013-14 to 290.91 lakh bales in 2025-26, the lowest harvest in 15 years.
The area fell from a 2019-20 peak of 134.77 lakh hectares to 114.82 lakh hectares, a loss of nearly 20 lakh hectares in six seasons.
Dr Prasad has been blunt about the underlying cause of the production fall. “The highest cotton production of 360 lakh bales during the last 10 years was achieved in 2019, largely due to an increase in cotton area to a high of 13 million hectares,” he says.
“Since then, cotton production has even fallen below 300 lakh bales. The loss of about 60 lakh bales is linked to increased frequency of extreme rainfall events during the season across all cotton growing zones,” he adds.
The moth had learnt. The country had not.
THE COTTON INDIA STOPPED GROWING
In Vidarbha, the heartland of Indian cotton, farmers began returning to a plant their grandfathers had grown.
Desi cotton, the indigenous species Gossypium arboreum and Gossypium herbaceum, had been India’s cotton for at least 4,000 years before the British and the Americans arrived with their longer-staple varieties in the 19th century. Staple refers to the length of the individual cotton fibre.
Long-staple cotton is needed for fine yarn and premium fabric. Desi cotton fibres are short, around 20 to 25 millimetres, and coarse, suitable for hand-spinning but historically considered too rough for high-speed mills.
It is also, almost spectacularly, indifferent to the pests that have defeated Bt cotton.
“Desi cotton, especially the diploid arboreum species, is native to the Indian subcontinent,” Dr Prasad explains. “It is well adapted to a dry tropical climate with pest and disease tolerance.”
Diploid arboreum species are native cotton varieties characterised by having two complete sets of chromosomes.
He traces the slow displacement of the indigenous plant by its American cousin. “The American upland cotton varieties of hirsutum tetraploid species were introduced about 200 years ago for their superior long staple fibre,” Dr Prasad says.
Hirsutum tetraploid species are cotton plants with four sets of chromosomes, bred from the American Gossypium hirsutum species for longer, finer fibre.
“Development of hybrid technology by 1970 led to a substantial shift in cultivation from desi cotton to American cotton by the 1990s, driven by higher yield compared to desi cotton,” he adds.
“However, the hirsutum hybrids were susceptible to bollworms, which led to the introduction of genetically modified Bt cotton in 2002. Breeding of desi cotton varieties and hybrids is continuing, but the area under cultivation is negligible and restricted to a few pockets in the country, as the market is geared for superior staple cotton,” Dr Prasad explains.
Desi cotton evolved in the same Indian soils, alongside the same Indian insects, for long enough to develop its own biochemical defences. It is immune to cotton leaf curl virus. It tolerates whiteflies and leaf hoppers.
Om Prakash, Editor, Kisan Tak, agrees that Desi Cotton’s revival is no longer a fringe idea inside India’s farm science circles.
“A large section of scientists sees the revival of Desi Cotton as the future, given its natural resilience to climate change and pests,” he tells IndiaToday.in. “The message from the field is clear. The next revolution will stem from the synergy of genetics and management, such as mechanical picking and intensive cultivation.”
The biochemistry of desi cotton’s defences is partly understood. Gossypium arboreum produces higher concentrations of gossypol, a yellow phenolic compound stored in the small dark pigment glands that dot the leaves and stems of the cotton plant.
The compound is toxic to many insects. Its insecticidal properties are documented in a Journal of Chemical Ecology paper published in 2008. American varieties, bred over generations to reduce gossypol for easier industrial processing, traded chemical defence for cleaner processing.
It is the kind of trade-off a food technologist learns to recognise. The moment a crop is engineered for downstream convenience rather than upstream resilience, something biological is quietly subtracted.
In rice, it is the fibre and micronutrients lost to polishing. In American cotton, it was the very compound that had kept Indian cotton plants alive in Indian soils for millennia. India bought the trade-off without quite knowing it had.
“Cotton in these states can see a revival by promoting desi cotton,” Dr Prasad says of the northern zone. “The hot and dry environmental conditions in the north are ideally suited to the production of short staple fibre.”
He is also honest about what could still stand in the way. “The only spoiler for the revival of desi cotton is the frequent occurrence of extreme weather events, especially rainfall, even in the northern zone,” he says.
The plant itself is ready. It is waiting, in cold storage, in the gene banks at ICAR-National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, the country’s official seed and germplasm repository, which holds one of the largest collections of Gossypium arboreum in the world. Most of it has not been touched seriously in two decades.
THE SEEDS NOBODY APPROVED
While the official conversation has stayed fixated on Bollgard-II, the actual fields of central India have moved on.
Dr Verma, who is also the Executive Director of the Bioseeds Division at DCM Shriram, estimates that more than 22 per cent of India’s cotton area in 2025 was planted with illegal herbicide-tolerant Bt cotton, known as HTBt.
The technology is cotton engineered to survive a spray of glyphosate, the herbicide that has revolutionised weed management in American and Brazilian cotton fields.
It has been approved in most major cotton-producing countries. In India, it has never been cleared by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee, the country’s apex GM (genetic modification) regulator. It is being grown anyway, on an estimated 25 to 30 lakh hectares, an area larger than the entire cotton sector of Brazil.
“Gujarat, where seed production of illegal HTBt cotton started more than 15 years ago, continues to be the largest supplier of such illegally produced seed,” Dr Verma says.
“The central Government had, in the past, set up a committee which identified not only the companies involved but also the source of parental lines and germplasm using DNA-based technologies. No action was taken against those companies, and this activity has proliferated significantly since then,” he adds.
What is striking is the precision of the illegal market. “Over time they have also introgressed, through breeding, these unapproved genes in hybrids having good agronomic adaptation in Indian growing conditions,” Dr Verma says. “Therefore, many farmers do get good performance from illegal seeds with unapproved genes.”
Introgression is the slow work of moving a desirable gene from one variety into another by repeated crossing. That this is happening at a commercial scale outside the regulatory system means that somewhere in the country, breeding programmes parallel to the formal seed industry have built up the technical capability to do everything a legal seed company can do, except sell their product legally.
“Since such seed remains outside regulatory purview, there is no redressal mechanism for those farmers who suffer because of the poor quality or performance of illegal seed,” Dr Verma says.
The farmer is voting, in other words. With his field, his money, and his risk. The illegal HTBt market is the single clearest signal that the gap between what science can deliver and what Indian policy will permit has become structurally unsustainable.
THE FROZEN DECADE
The last new GM cotton event approved in India was Bollgard-II, in 2006. The country has not cleared a single new transgenic crop, in any species, since 2010, when the Environment Ministry placed a moratorium on Bt brinjal after political opposition led by the then Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh.
A transgenic crop is a plant whose DNA has been deliberately modified by scientists to carry a useful gene taken from an entirely different species, such as a bacterium, a virus, or another plant, in order to give the crop a new trait it could never have developed on its own.
Desirable traits include the ability to produce its own insecticide, as in Bt cotton, which carries a gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis.
“Unfortunately, the political support for development of new GM technologies eroded after the moratorium on Bt brinjal,” Dr Verma says. “This was followed by several ad hoc policy interventions by successive governments, which made it impossible to even do research, which required field trials to be conducted in confinement. Hence, no new technology approval in the last 20 years.”
The most damaging intervention came in 2011, when the central government began requiring applicants for confined field trials of GM crops to obtain a No Objection Certificate from the state government concerned.
State agriculture departments have neither the technical expertise nor the institutional mechanism to evaluate such proposals on scientific grounds. The decision became political, at the level of the chief minister’s office.
“Even though the central government is trying to remove the bottleneck, most state governments are not on the same page,” Dr Verma says.
The result, for nearly two decades, has been a regulatory architecture that processes nothing. The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee has approved no new GM event for cultivation. The companies that built India’s biotechnology pipeline in the early 2000s have either downsized their research, moved it offshore, or shut it down.
While the moth was evolving every single season, the laboratories that should have been keeping pace with it were waiting for a signature that never came.
THE PIPELINE OF UNUSED SCIENCE
What is most striking, listening to scientists inside the country today, is that India is not technologically behind. It is administratively behind.
Dr Verma says two new cotton technologies, both developed in India, both ready for the field, are sitting in the regulatory pipeline today.
The first is herbicide-tolerant cotton, the legal version of the HTBt already being grown illegally. “The herbicide resistance technology has completed all regulatory trials and can be approved for cultivation any time by the Government,” he says.
The second is a new generation of Bt itself, this time with Cry proteins specifically engineered to target the pink bollworm. “Three Indian companies are currently working to develop new Bt technology for resistance to pink bollworm,” Dr Verma says. “These new Bt genes are different from the Bt genes in Bollgard-II and therefore produce different Cry proteins which specifically target the pink bollworm.”
If the regulatory trials proceed without state government obstruction, the pink bollworm-resistant Bt could be approved by 2028.
“HTBt and the new Bt for pink bollworm resistance could together increase cotton yield by more than 25 to 30 per cent, besides reducing the cost of cultivation, and change the cotton crop economics drastically,” Dr Verma says.
He is careful about what the new technology will do, and what it will not do. “Neither of these will be a replacement for Bollgard-II. They will be add-ons and will be stacked with Bollgard-II.”
Bollgard-II still works against the American bollworm and the tobacco cutworm, the other major bollworm species that once devastated Indian cotton.
It is only against the pink bollworm that it has lost its grip. Bollgard-II is not a discarded technology. It is an incomplete one, awaiting the next layer.
Professor Bansal explains the next generation. The most discussed candidate is RNA interference, or RNAi, a natural mechanism inside almost every living cell that acts like a switch capable of turning off specific genes.
Scientists are now using it in crops by designing plants that produce tiny RNA molecules which, when an insect eats the plant, slip inside the pest and silence a gene the insect needs to survive, killing it without using any toxin at all.
“While Bt cotton kills insects using a Cry protein toxin produced inside the plant, the RNAi strategy works more like a genetic silencing system,” Professor Bansal says. “The plant produces small RNA molecules designed to interfere with essential genes inside the insect pest. When the insect feeds on the plant, these RNA molecules enter the insect and switch off critical genes needed for their survival, growth, or reproduction.”
Because the silencing is targeted to one gene in one species, the technology promises a level of precision that Bt toxins could never offer. There is, in principle, no off-target damage to beneficial insects, and no foreign protein in the final tissue.
The discovery of the RNAi mechanism, published in Nature in 1998, won its authors the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2006. Its application to cotton pest control was demonstrated in a 2007 Nature Biotechnology paper.
“There is a strong possibility that RNAi could control pink bollworm that has evolved resistance to Bt proteins in cotton,” Professor Bansal says.
Then there is gene editing. The Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR system has already produced its first commercial Indian crops.
In May 2025, the ICAR-Indian Institute of Rice Research released two CRISPR-edited rice varieties, DRR Dhan 100 and Pusa DST Rice 1.
Neither contains any foreign DNA. Both were created by precisely cutting and editing genes that already existed inside the rice genome, the way a careful proofreader corrects a misspelt word in a manuscript without importing text from another book. The original CRISPR-Cas9 method that made this possible was published in the journal Science in 2012.
In cotton, Professor Bansal says, the same approach holds enormous promise for traits like drought tolerance, fibre quality, and pest resistance.
But he is unsentimental about the limits. “Can the use of gene editing avoid resistance development? Not completely. Whenever a single control mechanism is used continuously over large areas, living organisms can evolve around it. Gene editing also cannot solve pest problems permanently.”
He sees the road forward as ecological as much as genetic. “We need sustainable pest management, and will still require maintaining refuge or resistance-management practices, integrated pest management, biological control, monitoring of pest evolution, and continuous innovation,” Professor Bansal says.
“Modern genetics and genomics tools can now combine multiple resistance traits in one genotype through conventional breeding, genomic selection, marker-assisted breeding, transgenics, and CRISPR-based gene-editing tools,” he explains.
All this must be achieved without sacrificing maximum yield potential under ideal conditions.
There is no silver bullet. There is only the relentless management of an evolving enemy, and the willingness to keep producing new tools faster than the enemy can adapt to old ones.
THE CHINA MIRROR
China grows cotton on roughly 30 lakh hectares, less than a third of India’s planted area, and produces twice as much fibre. Its yield, by International Cotton Advisory Committee data, is around 2,200 kilograms of lint per hectare. India’s yield in 2025-26 fell below 450 kilograms.
The Mission for Cotton Productivity’s 2031 target is 755 kilograms, a figure that would almost double current productivity. China is already at three times that.
Most striking of all, China achieved this with the single-gene Bt that India abandoned for the supposedly superior Bollgard-II.
“China has achieved productivity levels three times higher than India’s, despite still using the single-gene version of Bt cotton,” Dr Prasad explains. “This was made possible through the dissemination and widespread adoption of a well-orchestrated Bt resistance management strategy, coupled with improved location-specific precision agronomic practices integrated with GM technology.”
He widens the lens to show that the gap is not just about China. “The argument that productivity stagnation in India is solely due to seed technology fatigue, since we are still using Bollgard-II, is not entirely tenable,” Dr Prasad says.
“Countries like Australia and Brazil have achieved four times higher productivity, and the USA about twice as much, owing to the deployment of more advanced genetically modified technologies,” he adds.
“However, in these countries, the benefits of advanced GM seed varieties are realised in synergy with precision agronomy and crop protection over large farms. Globally, seed genetics is estimated to contribute about 50 per cent to realised productivity. The rest comes from interactions with the growing environment and crop management practices,” Dr Prasad explains.
Around 89 per cent of China’s cotton is grown in Xinjiang province, in high desert plains where sunshine is abundant, humidity is low, and pest pressure is naturally suppressed by climate.
The fields use high-density precision planting, drip irrigation, drone-based crop monitoring, and almost complete mechanical picking. Seed cotton arrives at ginning factories with pre-cleaning equipment capable of bringing trash content below two per cent, a level Indian ginning rarely achieves.
Trash content, the proportion of non-fibre material like leaf fragments, stems, and dust inside a bale of cotton, is the single most important variable in spinning quality.
A bale at two per cent trash content fetches a premium price on global markets. A bale with an eight to 14 per cent trash content, typical of Indian manually picked cotton sells at a discount.
India’s cotton fields use roughly 2.5 to 3 kilowatts of farm power per hectare. China uses 6 to 8. Australia uses 15 to 20. Cotton picking is fully mechanised in Australia and 100 per cent machine-picked in the United States. In India, it is still done almost entirely by hand.
Dr Prasad is exact about what India lacks to make the leap. “Use of hybrid seeds of bushy plant types, sown manually at wider spacing with widely varying production plans related to nutrient, water and crop health management practices in small farms under rainfed conditions, has been a big hindrance for machine picking of cotton in India,” he says.
“Another bottleneck is the absence of approved and effective chemical defoliants for preparing the crop ready prior to machine picking. Also, processing of machine-picked seed cotton, which has a high trash content of 14 per cent and above, to acceptable levels of less than 2 per cent, requires modernisation of ginning factories with pre-cleaning equipment. A policy on government support for mechanisation of cotton picking is essential for making this a reality in the near future,” Dr Prasad explains.
The Mission’s pivot to High Density Planting Systems, known as HDPS, is the first attempt at structural reform. In HDPS, farmers plant compact, short-duration cotton at densities of 1.2 to 2 lakh plants per hectare, against the 10,000 to 12,000 plants per hectare in conventional hybrid cotton.
The plants are smaller, more determinate, which means they stop putting out new leaves and commit to producing bolls earlier in the cycle, and finish in 150 days or less, ideally escaping the peak of the pink bollworm life cycle.
But HDPS does not work without chemical defoliants to prepare the crop for mechanical harvest, and India has not approved any.
It does not work without modernised ginning factories, and the country has fewer than 500 fully automated units against a need for several thousand.
The Mission proposes 2,000 new ginning and processing units. Most of them will have to be private investment.
WHITE GOLD, BLACK MARKET
While scientists debate evolution and regulation, the farmer is making a more immediate calculation.
Our Kisan Tak editor, Om Prakash, has tracked the price collapse from inside the cotton belt. In 2021, cotton farmers in Maharashtra were selling at Rs 12,000 per quintal. Today, in May 2026, the Minimum Support Price for cotton is Rs 7,710 per quintal, but the market price has crashed to roughly Rs 4,800. For nearly a full year, cotton has been selling below MSP.
“In the 2024-25 season, India imported a record 4.1 million bales of cotton,” Om Prakash tells IndiaToday.in. “For the upcoming 2025-26 season, imports are projected to rise even further, potentially reaching 5 million bales.”
The mechanism is well understood inside the trade. When global cotton prices fall, the Indian textile industry lobbies the central government to drop the 11 per cent import duty on raw cotton. Cheaper foreign cotton floods Indian mills. Domestic demand for Indian cotton collapses. The Indian farmer, holding the same MSP-rated crop, watches the market price fall below his cost of production.
“Whenever cotton prices rise, the textile industry lobbies against it, leading to artificial price drops through reduced import duties, which inevitably results in losses for farmers,” Om Prakash says. “This is not merely a matter of market statistics. It is a betrayal of the trust a farmer places in their land and government.”
Between August and December 2025, the government removed the 11 per cent import duty for five months. Imports surged. The textile industry has now requested the same duty be removed again from May to October 2026.
“The greatest risk is that once India’s own production collapses, countries currently exporting cheap cotton will establish a monopoly,” Om Prakash says. “At that point, the nation will lose its ‘white gold’, and the textile industry will lose its bargaining power.”
The Mission for Cotton Productivity does not mention import policy. It does not mention textile industry lobbying. The science it proposes will mean very little to a farmer who, having grown a 25 per cent better crop with HDPS and a new short-duration variety, finds the price he gets has fallen by 30 per cent.
The land lost over five years is the clearest evidence of how deep the damage runs. “Over the last five years, the land under cotton cultivation has shrunk by 2 million hectares,” Om Prakash says.
“This decline is driven not just by a lack of technology, but by suppressed prices and unfavourable policies. If the government continues to open the doors to imports under industrial pressure, domestic farmers may abandon cotton cultivation entirely,” he adds.
Om Prakash’s closing question lands hard. “While the government promotes the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat, why is it rolling out the red carpet for foreign cotton?” he asks. “Is Make in India destined to lean on the crutches of foreign raw materials at the expense of Indian farmers’ interests?”
THE MATHEMATICS OF THE MISSION
The Cabinet has approved Rs 5,659.22 crore. The target is 498 lakh bales by 2031, against the current 290.91. The yield target is 736 to 755 kilograms of lint per hectare, against the current sub-450.
Dr Prasad performs the arithmetic out loud. “The target of 498 lakh bales in the next five years entails a compound annual growth rate of 8.9 per cent,” he says. “Yearly cumulative increase of more than 30 lakh bales is targeted. This entails a mission-oriented approach for rollout and effective implementation in close coordination with the states.”
He is too professional to call the number unattainable. He is too honest to call it realistic. India has not sustained an 8.9 per cent compound annual growth in cotton productivity for any meaningful period in the last 40 years.
“The mission should not largely remain a government-driven initiative, but should have sufficient private sector participation, especially in the area of seeds, crop inputs, and machinery,” Dr Prasad says.
What the Mission can credibly accomplish is clear. Short-duration HDPS varieties.
Region-specific climate-resilient seeds must be bred through marker-assisted selection, a breeding technique that uses DNA markers to track desirable traits across generations.
Approval of HTBt cotton, possibly within the year. Approval of new pink bollworm-resistant Bt by 2028.
A parallel push on six alternative fibres; milkweed, flax, ramie, sisal, banana, and bamboo, none of which will replace cotton commercially in the next decade, but all of which expand the textile industry’s options for a climate-changed century.
“For the first time, the mission is initiating research and development work on new-age fibres,” Dr Prasad says. “This is a welcome step for diversifying the basket of natural fibres.”
He is equally clear-eyed about what the Mission must do differently this time. “The mission rightly recognised the need for developing product profiles suitable for different growing conditions,” he says. “The target is to develop region-specific climate-resilient seed types combining desired traits with the help of advanced molecular and speed breeding techniques.”
What the Mission cannot fix on its own is the regulatory architecture that has frozen Indian agricultural biotechnology since 2010.
It cannot fix the structural advantage that foreign cotton enjoys when the import duty is dropped. It cannot fix the broken extension system that failed to teach refuge planting to a generation of Bt cotton farmers.
The mission, in essence, is asking Indian cotton science to do in five years what it was not allowed to do for the last 20.
THE MOTH, AT THE END
Somewhere in a cotton field in Vidarbha this week, a pink bollworm is hatching from an egg laid on a green boll.
It will burrow into the lint, eat its way through three or four locules of the cotton flower, the chambers that hold the seeds and fibre, and pupate in the soil at the base of the plant.
It will emerge as a moth, mate, and lay its own eggs. Its offspring will carry, in their genome, whatever resistance their mother carried.
The moth does not know about Bollgard-III. It does not know about CRISPR, or RNAi, or the No Objection Certificates that the seed industry has been chasing through state secretariats for 15 years.
It only knows what every living thing knows, which is that the next generation must survive, by whatever route the chemistry of its own gut allows.
What it has done, over the last two decades, is exactly what any biology textbook would have predicted it would do. What India did not do, over the same two decades, is the more curious story.
“I hope the history of Indian cotton is remembered not merely for adopting powerful technologies like Bt genes, RNAi or gene editing,” Professor Bansal says.
“But for learning how to use them wisely and sustainably, in the form of a success story globally. I hope that the Indian cotton example becomes a global example of how modern biotechnology and ecological wisdom can work together to support farmers, sustainability, and national prosperity in a changing climate,” he adds.
Dr Prasad, in his own measured way, leaves the same hope at a different door.
“The cotton sector is at a crossroads at present. The current Mission on Cotton Productivity has been long overdue but timely,” he says.
“India will be remembered if the mission is able to address its unique production challenges of agro-ecological diversity, smallholder-dominated landscape, variation in production practices and resource use efficiency, and also takes giant strides towards improvement of the quality of cotton it produces and supplies to the world,” he adds.
He explains that India will be remembered if it can transform its cotton supply and value chain as an important source of premium natural fibre that the world loves in the face of ever-increasing global warming and climate change.
It is a hope, not a prediction.
The moth has been ready for years. The plant has been ready for years. The science has been ready for years. The laboratory has been ready for years. It is the country that needs to buckle up.
In a gene bank in Delhi, Gossypium arboreum waits. In a regulatory file in Delhi, herbicide-tolerant cotton waits.
In a confined trial somewhere in central India, the new Cry proteins wait. In a sealed packet at a dealer’s shop in Maharashtra, an illegal seed of a technology India never approved is already moving through the country, faster than its laws can follow.
Cotton has been called India’s white gold for a hundred years and more, the soft, shining thread out of which the country once dressed itself, fed its mills, paid its farmers, and held its place in the world.
It is fading now, not in a single dramatic season, but in the way most things of value fade in this country, slowly, quietly, while everyone is looking the other way.
The Mission for Cotton Productivity is the chance to stop the fading.
Whether the laboratory finally starts running again, whether the regulator finally signs, and whether the state finally lets the science breathe will decide what Indian cotton looks like in 2031, and whether anyone in this country is still growing it in 2050.
The moth ran for 20 years. India can still outrun it.
– Ends