Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant Memorial Lecture: II

caretakers: the subsistence farmers and the individual breeders in universities,
government departments and industry. Both kept it alive for different reasons.
Furthermore, the saving grace has been that most (about 80 percent) of the germplasm
was exchanged around the world (except, notably, the erstwhile USSR and East
Germany) not through government channels but from one breeder to another through
mail. This formed an informal and totally non-political network of plant breeders who
cared more for science and service to the society than for politics. In fact, the Green
Revolution in India is the result of such a scientific exchange of the very advanced
breeding material of the Mexican dwarf wheat which were subjected to selection under
local environmental conditions. Reciprocally, India has contributed to the cantaloupe
industry (35,000 acres) in California by powdery mildew resistant genes format he wild
melon of India. This has made a significant difference to wherever cataloupe is grown
particularly the American cantaloupe industry. Many such instances exist where useful
genes came from gene-rich developing countries, but their utilization took place in
technology-rich (but gene-poor) industrial countries. (Khoshoo, 1988).
However, eversince germplasm has caught the eye of the Politicians,
businessmen (multinationals), diplomats, bureaucrats, economists, lawyers, the press
and the public at large, a lot politics ha been injected in biodiversity, on account of
wrong and inflated premises. Thus, the subject is becoming increasingly a political
issue.
The present descriptive activities of Botanical Survey of India, Zoological Survey
of India and Wildlife Institute of India need to be tapared in the next 5 years; these
organization need to be reorganized and revamped into one connected whole as
biological Resource Survey of India (BRSI). Mere clubbing these together into BRSI will
not help, but there has to be a qualitative change in all the three. This can be
accomplished in two ways. By screening the present staff and picking up about 40-50
persons (20-35 years) for advanced training in various institutions all over the world.
Alternatively, the Ministry of Environment and Forests could organize rigorous training
courses by a hand-picked core Indian and a floating foreign faculty. This could be done
at the Centre for Ecological Research at the Indian Institute of Sciences (Banglore)
and/or at the Centre for Advanced Study, Botany Department Banaras Hindu University.
Unless this is done, biodiversity in India will languish and we would lose what we have.
If today, any multinational corporation (MNC) wants to steal any material from
India, there is no way it can be prevented. Classical cases of stealing, in historical time,
of germplasm out of their native countries are rubber, coffee, cashew, cinchona, etc.
Many of the industrial crops are based on introduction of only a few seeds. More often,
such stealing took place via the Royal Botanical Garden Kew (England). At present,
there is no way we can prove that a particular material has been stolen and used by a
MNC. The reason is that biodiversity is still in the descriptive phase in our country. No
use has been made of the modern, almost foolproof, techniques which can render
identification of a species or a variety or even a strain of a crop easy. The lesson to be
learnt is that we must bring in modern science and technology in the area of
biodiversity.
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