Supreme Court seeks response from Centre on GM crops

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday sought the response of the Centre on a contempt petition filed by Aruna Rodrigues challenging the Union government’s decision to grant approval for GM Mustard against the report of the Technical Expert Committee appointed by the apex court.

A three-judge Bench of Chief Justice T.S. Thakur and Justices A.K. Sikri and Ms. R. Banumathi asked counsel Prashant Bhushan appearing for the petitioner to serve a copy of the contempt petition on the Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi and asked the Centre to respond in two weeks.

Mr. Bhushan submitted that the decision to grant approval for GM Mustard is against the committee’s report  which has called for no open field trials or any commercial release of GM crops. In spite of the report the government was going ahead with the grnat of approval, he said.

In her petition, Aruna Rodrigues said the government was wilfully proceeding with numerous GMO field trials in our food crops, small scale BRL I in respect of which these orders were passed.

She alleged that the government was also proceeding with large-scale field trials or BRL II, the latter for commercial introduction into India for the first time of herbicide tolerant (HT) crops of Mustard, cotton and corn (stacked Bt and HT). These field trials have ignored fundamental bio-safety precautions. She pointed out that Bio-safety studies and risk assessment protocols must be addressed.