Demand Supply Gap in Quality Seeds in India

The foundation of green revolution in the country was hybrid, high yielding seeds. The Government established National Seeds Corporation (NSC) in 1963 to undertake production of foundation and certified seeds. NSC and the state seed corporations did commendable job in production of high yield variety seeds of crops such as wheat, rice, maize, bajra etc. But these public sector companies could not go beyond the production of seeds for cereals. Gradually, their work went on decline. Since, the private sector was not opened for this activity, quality seed production segment remained neglected.

After the 1991 LPG reforms, the private multinational corporations were allowed to enter into India’s seed market. But these companies preferred to deal in the non-food, high value and low volume crops, because of higher profit margins. This led to significant increase in fruits, vegetables and other non food crops such as Cotton. Cotton is one non-food crop whose bumper production is due to availability of hybrid and Bt seeds from private sector.

However, the production of quality seeds for wheat, rice and other staples remained largely in the public sector. The implication of this imbalance was that –

• On one hand, there was inadequate availability of quality seeds for low value high volume crops such as staples
• On the other hand, there was a rise in the productivity of some high value crops, such as vegetables and fruit due to availability of quality seeds.

The private sector players did not deal in wheat and other such crops due to their peculiar reproductive biology also. We note here that Wheat and Rice, both are self pollinating crops. This implies that these plants use their own pollens to bear a fruit (called ear).  Thus, the harvested grains from one season can be saved and used in subsequent seasons without much deterioration in yield for at least two or three seasons. This is a problem in economics of seed – because all research efforts would reach to the farmer embodied in that seed only. These efforts can be almost fully appropriated by the farmers without paying anything to the researcher. This discourages private investment and necessitates public investment in improving the crop varieties in such self pollinating crops.

However, hybrid crops encourage them private investment because of their peculiar ability called heterosis (refers to increase yield in hybrid). But, the yield gain obtained due to heterosis would suffer dramatically in the next generation. Thus, hybridisation was a lucrative business that  private sector produced almost every seed as a hybrid seed – to keep profit as main focus – because these seeds are needed to be purchased freshly for each sowing.

Further, private sector players sold only those seeds which were developed via their own in-house research. It was also unfortunate that despite of more number of varieties developed by public sector in India in comparison to private sector, the quality seed could not reach to the farmers.