Global Transgenic Crop Lessons Point India Toward Its Next Agricultural Leap

Transgenic technology has quietly reshaped agriculture across the world since the mid-1990s, moving desirable genes into crop plants across the barriers of sexual compatibility and, in doing so, accelerating the development of new cultivars beyond what conventional breeding alone can achieve. A new review published in the Indian Journal of Genetics and Plant Breeding examines what three decades of global experience with genetically modified crops can teach India, a country that has embraced exactly one transgenic food-and-fibre success story, Bt cotton, while leaving most of its crop portfolio untouched by the technology. The authors, led by BS Dhillon of Punjab Agricultural University and including Sujay Rakshit of ICAR-Indian Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology, synthesize global evidence to identify strategic priorities for advancing transgenic innovations in Indian agriculture, and their conclusions carry weight for anyone concerned with the future of food security in South Asia.

The technical logic of transgenesis is straightforward but powerful. Where a breeder seeking a target trait must find it within the primary gene pool of a crop, a transgenic approach can source the gene from any organism, including microbes, unrelated plants, or even the crop’s own genome rearranged in new ways. The major traits incorporated into commercial transgenic crops to date fall into four broad categories: herbicide tolerance, insect resistance, tolerance of abiotic stresses such as drought and salinity, and nutritional enhancement. Insect-resistant crops typically deploy genes derived from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, whose crystalline toxin proteins, modified for enhanced expression in plant tissues, disrupt the gut of specific larval pests while leaving beneficial insects largely unharmed. Herbicide-tolerant crops carry enzymes insensitive to broad-spectrum herbicides such as glyphosate, allowing farmers to control weeds with simpler spray regimes. The review emphasizes that these are not exotic interventions but extensions of a long tradition of genetic exchange that plant breeders have practised for a century, from the transfer of leaf-rust resistance from Aegilops umbellulata into wheat in the 1950s to the wide hybridization programmes that underpin modern triticale.

The global adoption record is striking. Since the first commercial plantings in 1996, biotech crops have spread to tens of millions of hectares across more than two dozen countries, with soybean, maize, cotton and canola dominating the area. Meta-analyses of agronomic and economic outcomes, including the widely cited work of Klümper and Qaim, indicate that transgenic varieties have generally delivered reduced pesticide use, higher yields and improved farmer profits, with the largest gains accruing to smallholders in developing countries. Economic assessments covering 1996 to 2020 estimate cumulative farm income gains in the tens of billions of dollars and document reductions in pesticide spraying and associated carbon emissions. The review notes that these benefits have not been uniform, and that outcomes depend heavily on the trait, the crop, the pest complex and the stewardship practices that accompany deployment, but the overall pattern of evidence supports the view that the technology, when well managed, has been a net positive for productivity and environmental load.

India’s own experience with Bt cotton is the centerpiece of the domestic evidence base. Approved for cultivation in 2002, Bt cotton expressing the Cry1Ac toxin, and later stacked events, spread rapidly to cover more than ninety percent of the cotton area, transforming India from a cotton importer into one of the world’s largest producers and exporters. Yields rose, insecticide sprays against bollworms fell, and farm incomes improved in the early years of adoption. Yet the review is candid about the cautionary side of the story. Field-evolved resistance in the pink bollworm, Pectinophora gossypiella, was documented in central India within a decade of introduction, and widespread infestations on Bt cotton have since eroded some of the early gains. The authors point to inadequate compliance with refuge requirements, the planting of non-Bt cotton strips designed to slow the evolution of resistant pests, and the persistence of unapproved or diluted seed markets as contributing factors. The lesson, they argue, is not that the technology failed but that stewardship, seed quality control and resistance management are inseparable from any transgenic deployment.

Safety concerns have shadowed transgenic crops from the outset, and the review confronts them directly. Novel gene combinations have raised questions about potential risks to human and animal health, biodiversity and the environment, and these questions have fuelled some of the most contentious episodes in modern science communication. The authors revisit the Séralini affair, in which a 2012 rodent feeding study linking glyphosate-tolerant maize to tumours was widely criticized on statistical and design grounds, retracted, and later republished elsewhere, with regulatory agencies including the European Food Safety Authority concluding that it did not demonstrate harm. They also note the monarch butterfly controversy, in which laboratory findings of Bt pollen toxicity to larvae were subsequently weighed against field evidence and habitat loss as the dominant driver of population declines. More broadly, comprehensive reviews of livestock feeding studies have found no consistent adverse health effects from approved GM feed, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded in 2016 that genetically engineered crops are as safe as their conventional counterparts when properly regulated. The review stresses that every commercial transgenic crop undergoes rigorous evaluation for agronomic performance, food and feed safety, and compositional equivalence before release.

One of the more provocative threads in the review is the argument that transgenes are not inherently hazardous and that nature itself has been moving genes across species boundaries for millennia. The cultivated sweet potato, a staple food for millions, carries Agrobacterium T-DNA sequences with expressed genes in its genome, the result of ancient horizontal gene transfer, making it in a literal sense a naturally transgenic crop. Widespread horizontal gene transfer between plants and bacteria continues to be documented in modern genomes. The authors argue that increasing public awareness of such facts is critical for building societal confidence, because the perception of transgenesis as an alien and uniquely dangerous intervention rests on a misunderstanding of both the technology and natural biology. Transparent communication, they contend, must become a core component of any deployment strategy rather than an afterthought.

Gene flow and containment receive detailed technical treatment. Pollen-mediated transgene escape from cultivated fields to wild or weedy relatives has been demonstrated in crops such as rice, rapeseed and cotton, and the review surveys the strategies available for containment, including chloroplast transformation, male sterility systems, genetic use restriction technologies and spatial isolation. The risk profile, however, is highly crop-specific. A transgenic trait in a self-pollinating crop with no compatible wild relatives in the region of cultivation poses a very different ecological question than the same trait in an outcrossing species surrounded by interfertile wild populations. This crop-specific logic underpins the review’s central recommendation about where India should focus its transgenic efforts next.

Applying criteria that include the availability of target traits within the primary gene pool, consumption patterns, ecological risks and lessons from past experience, the authors identify transgrafted fruits, sugarcane, forage crops and maize as promising candidates for India. Transgrafting is technically elegant: a transgenic rootstock conferring disease resistance or other traits can be grafted with a non-transgenic scion, and in some systems mobile molecules such as transgene-derived small interfering RNAs travel from rootstock to scion, conferring virus resistance without genetically modifying the harvested fruit. Studies in grapevine, apple, sweet cherry, plum and blueberry have demonstrated the feasibility of the approach, and because the edible product may not carry the transgene, regulatory and consumer barriers could be lower. Sugarcane, propagated vegetatively and not grown from seed in the field, presents minimal gene-flow risk, while forage crops and maize offer clear targets in pest resistance and stress tolerance, with maize already the subject of global transgenic experience that India can draw upon directly.

The regulatory dimension is treated as decisive. India’s case-by-case framework, overseen by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee, has approved only Bt cotton for commercial cultivation, and the long-pending case of genetically modified mustard illustrates how regulatory decisions can stall under public and political pressure. Meanwhile, the government has moved to clarify the status of genome-edited plants, issuing standard operating procedures for regulatory review of SDN-1 and SDN-2 categories of targeted mutagenesis, which do not introduce foreign DNA and are treated more leniently in many jurisdictions. The review argues that strengthening regulatory capacity, ensuring timely and science-based decisions, and addressing public concerns through transparent communication are essential for effective and socially acceptable deployment. It also points to the experience of Bangladesh, where Bt eggplant was commercialized for smallholders, as evidence that South Asian farming systems can benefit from well-managed transgenic introductions beyond cotton.

The overall message of the review is one of disciplined optimism. Transgenic technology is neither a panacea nor a menace; it is a tool whose value depends on choosing the right crops, the right traits and the right stewardship systems, and on building the regulatory and communicative infrastructure that allows evidence rather than fear to guide adoption. For India, with its mounting pressures of population, climate variability, shrinking arable land and degrading water resources, the authors argue that the strategic question is not whether to use transgenic innovation but where and how to deploy it first. Their answer, grounded in global evidence and Indian experience alike, points toward fruit crops protected through transgrafting, sugarcane, forages and maize as the sensible frontier, with Bt cotton’s mixed legacy serving as both inspiration and warning for the road ahead.

Subject of Research: Global transgenic crop innovations and their strategic application to Indian agriculture

Article Title: Advancing Indian Agriculture Through Global Transgenic Innovations

Article References: Dhillon, B., Singh, A., Sohu, V., & Rakshit, S. (2026). Advancing Indian Agriculture Through Global Transgenic Innovations. Indian Journal of Genetics and Plant Breeding, 86(3), 261-278. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44489-026-00030-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44489-026-00030-3

Keywords: transgenic crops, Bt cotton, India, transgrafting, gene flow, biosafety, herbicide tolerance, insect resistance, pink bollworm resistance, maize, sugarcane, genome editing