Govt plans to change existing law to ensure availability of quality seeds to farmers. How will the proposed Bill to replace The Seeds Act, 1966 meet its objective of ‘regulating quality of seeds for sale, import, export’?
The existing 1966 law already provides for regulation of the quality of seeds. What does the new Bill seek to change?
The current Act only covers “notified kinds or varieties of seeds”. Thus, regulation of quality, too, is limited to the seeds of varieties that have been officially notified.
Such varieties would be mostly those that are bred by public sector institutions — the likes of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the state agricultural universities (SAUs) — and officially “released” for cultivation after multi-location trials, over three years or more, to evaluate their yield performance, disease and pest resistance, quality, and other desired traits.
Release is a precondition for notification. And the provisions of The Seeds Act, 1966, apply only to certified seeds produced of notified varieties.
The new Seeds Bill, 2019 provides for compulsory registration of “any kind or variety of seeds” that are sought to be sold. According to Section 14 of the draft Bill, “no seed of any kind or variety… shall, for the purpose of sowing or planting by any person, be sold unless such kind or variety is registered”.
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