What You Ought To Know About GMOs

With the Goverment of India being on the verge of potentially approving cultivation of a genetically modified food crop (a herbicide tolerant mustard crop), you must know why GMOs are harardous on a multitude of levels.

- Kavitha Kuruganti

The public debate over Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)—whether they are needed and are safe, how to assess the claimed benefits and potential risks, how decision making should proceed in a country like India, etc—is back in the limelight because the Government of India is on the verge of potentially approving a GM food crop (a herbicide tolerant mustard crop) for cultivation.

GMOs are living organisms whose genetic makeup has been tweaked unnaturally, most often through random insertion of alien genes, which are believed to carry desirable new characteristics. Such GMOs include seeds, which have an ability to further propagate themselves when they germinate and grow. While proponents make it appear that it is a precise and advanced breeding technology, the reality is that not only is this science unnatural, but imprecise, unpredictable, irreversible and uncontrollable (given that it is a self propagating living technology once released into the environment).