Analysts Call for Adaptive Governance Framework to Regulate Biopesticides in India

India's biopesticide sector requires an adaptive regulatory framework with mandatory post-market surveillance, time-limited approvals, and structural safeguards against industry capture, according to policy analysis by Pesticide Action Network India consultant Narasimha Reddy Donthi. Unlike chemical pesticides, biopesticides involve living organisms that evolve, requiring continuous monitoring rather than one-time approval.

Donthi argues that permanent approvals make little sense for living organisms whose environmental interactions change with season and climate, and where resistance in pest populations can emerge and ecological consequences may surface years after introduction. He proposes a regulatory model based on time-limited authorisations, conditional registrations requiring additional research, and mandatory adverse-event reporting to replace the approve-once framework inherited from chemical pesticide governance. Post-market surveillance should track soil microbial communities, non-target organisms, crop performance, water quality and biodiversity over multiple seasons in regions of widespread use.

Regulatory design choices include adapting existing pesticide law, creating separate biopesticide legislation, or developing a comprehensive pesticide management approach that acknowledges biological differences. India's federal structure adds complexity: central standards can ensure uniformity but may ignore regional variation, while state implementation varies widely in capacity. The analysis identifies the risk of regulatory capture as a central concern — where compliance costs affordable only to large firms, standards biased toward industrial production, and revolving doors between regulators and industry could exclude smaller actors and farmer-innovators from the market.

Donthi draws a practical boundary at commercialisation: products packaged, branded and sold with standardised claims fall under regulation, while farmer-made preparations for own use or local exchange should remain outside formal licensing to protect grassroots agricultural knowledge. Genetically modified organisms and species introduced from other ecosystems are placed in an entirely different risk category, warranting examination of whether they should be permitted at all given the largely irreversible nature of their release into open environments. He argues that the shortcomings of chemical pesticides created the opportunity for biological alternatives, and that poor governance could reproduce old failures under new labels.

Key figure — India generates an estimated 350 million tonnes of agricultural waste annually relevant to biopesticide feedstock systems