The dismissal of petitions seeking quashing of criminal prosecution of senior representatives of the University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwar (UAS), agri-biotech company Mahyco, and consultants Sathguru has paved the way for proceedings to be initiated against them in the Bt Brinjal biopiracy case wherein they have been accused of criminal conspiracy in using local brinjal varieties to develop the GM vegetable.
The ruling by Justice AS Pachhapure came on Friday after an earlier high court stay was challenged by the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) and Karnataka State Biodiversity Board (KBB). The accused had on January 3 obtained a stay on the criminal proceedings for six months. The stay had come just two days before the hearing of the case, and the both NBA and KBB had been in the dark about the development.
The NBA and KBB had on November 24, 2012 filed the criminal complaint of biopiracy before the principal civil judge and JFMC, Dharwar in response to various representations and complaints received from city-based trust Environment Support Group (ESG). A Dharwar bench had then stayed the criminal proceedings.
The petitions dismissed by the court on Friday were those filed by RR Hanchinal and HS Vijaykumar, vice-chancellor and registrar respectively of UAS. There was also a connected petition that had been filed by a former vice-chancellor of the university, SA Patil, who had also served as chairman of the Karnataka Krishi Mission and director of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi.
The itself issue dates back to February 2010 when at a public hearing question organised by then Union minister of state for environment and forests Jairam Ramesh, ESG had contended that the entire process by which the proprietary product had been developed was in violation of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, as well as the Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992. ESG had described this as "an outrageous act of biopiracy."
At the gathering, ESG produced evidence of all endemic varieties of brinjal that had been allegedly accessed by the UAS and Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco), with technical support from Sathguru Management Consultants Private Limited and USAID. The NGO alleged that the act of inserting the Bt gene (a proprietary product of Monsanto) had been undertaken without any consent of local Biodiversity Management Committees, the State Biodiversity Board and the National Biodiversity Authority.
ESG subsequently petitioned MPs urging them to act, and Ramesh's successor Jayanthi Natarajan reacted by announcing in Parliament in September 2011 that the NBA would follow up on the complaint as per law. There were inordinate delays in initiating criminal prosecution, and several members of the NBA board reportedly tried to defeat the initiative by voting against the minister’s decision. The efforts of the KBB too made little headway with the Karnataka government going slow on the issue.
Finally, the ESG filed a public interest litigation before the Karnataka High Court. It sought directions to compel the regulatory agencies to move against biopiracy complaints, strengthen the regulatory processes to prevent any further acts of biopiracy, and also ensure that the Biological Diversity Act was implemented in its letter and spirit. The court soon issued a notice to the regulatory agencies, and the NBA and KBB too filed a criminal complaint against the accused. The complaint was filed only on November 24, 2012 after the KBB member secretary, KS Sugara, refused to relieve the complaining officers (from Dharwar) till the criminal complaint was filed in court.
Reacting to the dismissal of the petitions, ESG's Leo Saldanha said in a statement, "This is critical because it is for the very first time that India has sought to implement the provisions of the Biodiversity Act tackling biopiracy, and thus the effort constitutes a major precedent to secure India's bioresources, associated traditional knowledge and biodiversity for the benefit of present and future generations."
