Who doesn't like simple stories? Wouldn't it be nice if we could toss out villains and live happily ever after? Unfortunately, this happens only in fairy tales.

Critics of Bt cotton technology used by farmers in Maharashtra blame farmers' suicides on the adoption of this technology. More sophisticated critics concede that other factors could be at play, but the guilt of Bt cotton is taken as self-evident even by them.

When I visited these villages in early June 2012, I found that these critical stories were the news. Many farmers were puzzled and amazed to be told that their encounter with Bt cotton was ruinous to them. And they were not just big farmers.

Pankaj Shinde is poor. He owns two acres of dry land in the small village of Antargaon. But by doubling his yield, Bt cotton had substantially raised his meager income. "I used to harvest merely three quintals of cotton before the arrival of Bt cotton. Now, I can even reach seven quintals," he said. Shinde is so poor that he and his five-member family also work as laborers for other farmers. The increased yield of Bt cotton on other farms has also raised the demand for labor for cotton picking.

"The benefit of Bt is obvious. I don't have irrigation. My five-acre land produced only seven quintals of cotton; a little over one-and-a-quarter quintal per acre. Now, Bt has pushed it up to five quintals per acre," said Dnyaneshwar Shrawan Fendar from Bhamraja, another village near Antargaon. These are yield figures of dry land cotton. With irrigation, the yield can be much higher. Farmers also reported that now they do not have to use pesticides for killing bollworms. The positive effect of Bt is palpable in these villages.

Critical questions have been raised about the media-reported earnings from Bt cotton of an educated farmer called Nandu Raut. In his interaction with me, Raut did not wish to endorse either story although he made it clear that Bt cotton worked for him. From other village accounts, it also seemed that there was an active effort to paint a dismal picture so that a case could be made for special government schemes. Farmers who spoke out about the benefits of Bt cotton risked censure from local 'opinion leaders' on this account.

It is certainly possible that the truth is much larger and complex than these individual accounts of farmers. Establishing correlations, much less causation, in agriculture is a daunting task. Individual accounts of farmers in these two villages need to be seen against the larger social reality.


Ten years after its arrival, Bt cotton varieties occupy 92 per cent of the total cotton area in Maharashtra. Shouldn't the choices of millions of farmers speak far more loudly about their own self-interest than the interviews with select growers? And, as almost all the cotton area in Maharashtra is rain-fed, this fact should also give pause to those who believe that Bt cotton varieties can never work in dry land agriculture.


It is little surprise; therefore, that academic research has largely confirmed substantial yield and income gains from Bt cotton varieties. The recent issue of Nature, a prestigious international weekly journal on science, has reported significant benefits of Bt cotton to Indian farmers. Citing a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it says that data collected from 533 farm households during 2002-08 shows that Bt cotton raised the yield by 24 per cent. This translated to a 50 per cent increase in profits, and during 2006-08, families that adopted Bt cotton spent 18 per cent more money than conventional farming households, suggesting an increase in living standards.


Although articles critical of Bt cotton can be read as indictments of big business and big media, what they do is offer a fable of their own, couched of course, in the voices of farmers. In this narrative, farmers are always victims of senseless technologies pushed on to them by greedy corporations. This is sought to be obscured from public record by a campaign of ceaseless propaganda that includes big media houses as willing participants.


Critics' concern about private monopolies and planted media coverage is understandable. However, this should not prevent recognition of the popularity of Bt cotton varieties. None of this is to say that there are no problems with the technology. However, denying farmers the capacity to make a reasoned choice demeans them and is a poor foundation for policy prescription. Banning cotton exports has demonstrably hurt millions of farmers. Yet, while the supposed adverse impact of Bt cotton finds repeated mention in urban discourse, stopping farmers from accessing markets and getting higher prices is par for the course and hardly attracts comment.


This article was originally published in the Economic Times dated 27th September, 2012, written by Milind Murugkar.