Summary
In The Hindu, K. VijayRaghavan argues that new genetic tools are reshaping India's staple crops and that India's largely public seed system for rice and wheat is a strategic advantage. In 2025 India became the first country to allow farmers to grow genome-edited rice, releasing DRR Dhan-100 (Kamala) and Pusa DST Rice-1, both developed by ICAR.
DRR Dhan-100 matures in 130 days instead of 150 and yields close to 20% more. Pusa DST Rice-1 yields 10-30% more in saline or alkaline soils. Because public institutions developed them, the seeds will not be tied up in restrictive patents.
The next frontier is synthetic apomixis, first demonstrated in rice in 2018 at the University of California, Davis, which lets hybrid plants produce seeds that are genetic copies of themselves, preserving hybrid vigour across generations.
WHY IT MATTERS FOR UPSC & STATE PCS
An analysis in The Hindu highlights how genome editing and synthetic apomixis could transform India's rice and wheat, building on the 2025 release of India's first genome-edited rice varieties by ICAR. The piece argues that India's public seed system positions it to spread these gains to smallholders without private patent monopolies.
Standard News
Photocopying Hybrid Vigour: Why Apomixis Could Free the Farmer From the Seed Counter
Here's what's actually happening. When breeders cross two different parent lines, the offspring often grow stronger and yield more than either parent. That boost is called hybrid vigour. The catch is that it lasts only one generation.
Plant the seed from a hybrid crop and the next generation's genes reshuffle, the crop becomes uneven and the vigour fades. So a farmer who wants hybrid yields must buy fresh hybrid seed every season. For a smallholder, that is a recurring cost and a recurring dependence on whoever sells the seed.
The mechanism:
from reshuffling to copying Think of a hybrid as a winning hand of cards. Normal reproduction reshuffles the deck every generation, so the winning hand breaks up. Apomixis photocopies the winning hand instead. Synthetic apomixis, first shown in rice in 2018 by Venkatesan Sundaresan and Imtiyaz Khanday at the University of California, Davis, does this in two steps:
- Turning off meiosis, the cell division that normally shuffles genes before reproduction, using gene editing.
- Activating a gene called BBM1, which triggers the egg cell to grow into an embryo without fertilisation. The result is a seed that is a genetic copy of its hybrid parent. Success rates in rice have reached around 90% and work is under way in maize and sorghum. Sundaresan shared the 2024 Wolf Prize in Agriculture and he and Khanday received a VinFuture Special Prize in December 2025 for self-cloning crops.
Where the analogy breaks: a photocopied hand never changes. Fields planted with genetically identical seed year after year are more exposed if a new disease emerges, so breeding must keep refreshing what gets copied.
Why ownership matters as much as science India's rice and wheat seed system is largely public.
ICAR laboratories and State agricultural universities produce breeder seed, which partners, including private companies, multiply into foundation seed. New public varieties are open to any registered seed company. That is unlike maize and cotton, where private firms dominate and unlike hybrid rice, where private companies dominate the seed market.
The 2025 genome-edited rice varieties show what public ownership delivers. DRR Dhan-100 matures in 130 days instead of 150 and yields close to 20% more. Pusa DST Rice-1 yields 10-30% more on saline or alkaline soils. Because ICAR developed them, they are not locked behind restrictive patents.
Apomixis raises the stakes. If a public breeder builds apomixis into a high-yielding hybrid, a farmer could save and replant hybrid seed for several seasons. If the trait is owned privately, the same science could become another product the farmer must license.
Where
India stands India is a global first-mover on genome-edited rice and has a public breeding system few countries can match. The next step is to make sure the self-copying hybrid, when it arrives in Indian fields, belongs to that public system. For GS3, this is biotechnology's real test: not whether it raises yields, but whether the gains stay with the farmer.
Quick Facts
Key numbers & takeaways — revise these first
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Rice and wheat occupy more than half of India's farmland and supply most of the calories Indians eat.
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The National Seeds Corporation was established in 1963.
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ICAR laboratories and State agricultural universities supply breeder seed, which partners multiply into foundation seed.
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DRR Dhan-100 (Kamala) and Pusa DST Rice-1 were released by ICAR on 4 May 2025 as India's first genome-edited rice varieties.
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DRR Dhan-100 matures in 130 days compared with 150 days for its parent variety.
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Apomixis was first demonstrated in rice in 2018 by Venkatesan Sundaresan and Imtiyaz Khanday at the University of California, Davis.
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Synthetic apomixis success rates in rice have reached around 90%.
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Venkatesan Sundaresan shared the 2024 Wolf Prize in Agriculture.
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The Indian government released 184 new crop varieties across 25 crops on 5 January 2026.
Connect the dots for your UPSC preparation.
Standard news covers the event. Log in to read our comprehensive analysis and uncover the hidden constitutional, structural, and ethical dimensions of this topic:
A step-by-step explanation of how CKX2 editing and OsDST editing work in India's two genome-edited rice varieties.
The structural map of India's seed system, from breeder seed to foundation seed and where private dominance is growing.
The full DRR Dhan-100 case study as a model of public ownership of gene-edited traits.
A way forward that puts apomixis inside the public breeding system and manages the genetic uniformity risk.
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