A multi-stakeholder roundtable discussion was organized by the Trust for Advancement of Agricultural Sciences (TAAS), ICAR and Federation of Seed Industry of India (FSII) at the National Agricultural Science Centre (NASC), Pusa Campus on 25 July 2026, bringing together 73 policymakers, regulators, scientists including international experts, industry, farmers, to deliberate on regulatory reforms, scientific requirements, commercialization pathways, and operational efficiencies, and develop a roadmap for modernizing India’s regulatory framework for GM and geneedited crops with the key objectives to: (i) identify inconsistent data requirements in approval processes; (ii) harmonize national rules with science-based international practices; (iii) evaluate how delayed approvals affect farmers’ incomes; and (iv) streamline approval pathways for GMOs/ Living Modified Organisms (LMOs) while upholding strict biosafety standards, to catalyse reforms that will accelerate innovation, ensure biosafety, and strengthen India’s position in global agricultural biotechnology.
Download-https://www.taas.in/Upload/Publications/639283302481633398.pdf
Recommendation no 7
Recognizing that gene-edited crops free from exogenous or foreign DNA do not pose the conventional risk associated with GMOs, the regulatory agencies need to consider exempting all gene edited products which do not have any foreign DNA, alongside to the currently exempted SDN-1 and SDN-2 crops from lengthy GMO biosafety protocols. Similarly, the cis-genic crop varieties developed using SDN-3 needs to be treated at par with SDN-1 and SDN-2 products, exempting from lengthy GMO biosafety protocols as they contain full length genes including promoter, etc. from sexually compatible species with history of safe use.
Regulatory inaction
To minimize the substantial economic costs of regulatory inaction, there is need to progressively shift effectively from process-based, ultra-precautionary models to product-specific, sciencebased risk-benefit frameworks that evaluate safety traits pragmatically. Stacking of already approved multiple GM events in a single variety via conventional breeding, needs no further testing and approval from agencies except in cases of suspected antagonistic interaction between stacked proteins. Reducing the period of field testing to two years both for the Notified Field Trials (NFTs) and the ICAR-led AICRP on GM crops is necessary to avoid duplication and inordinate delays in approvals.
The policy invited many comments -https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-perspective-taass-26-recommendations-gm-crops-rajarathinam--bhiec/
