Centre unveils another draft of Pesticide Management Bill

Might implicate farmers for violation, absolves inspectors from wrongdoing

The Centre has released a new draft Pesticide Management Bill 2017 to replace an almost 50-year old legislation governing the plant chemicals sector.

But, industry players and experts said it is not a big improvement from a similar draft Presented in Parliament in 2008 and does not address the core issues of applying penal provisions on companies marketing pesticides and not just manufacturing them and somewhat absolves the pesticide inspector from guilt but could end up implicating farmers also for violation of the rules made under the Act.

The draft which comes almost nine years after a similar Bill was introduced in Parliament by the then UPA government has been uploaded on the agriculture’s website.

In the UPA’s time, the bill was referred to a standing committee of Parliament which had suggested some changes which the new draft hadn’t incorporated, sources said.

These include accountability of pesticide inspectors for approving spurious pesticides and time frame of data protection.

The Parliamentary panel then had suggested that pesticide inspectors should also be held responsible for growth and approval of spurious pesticide, which the new draft hasn’t incorporated.

The parliamentary panel then had suggested that data protection be extended to five years and data submitted with application to not be reused by another applicant for three years, which the current draft does not have.

Some experts said the draft bill also does not ease the powers of regulation and registration to the state governments which has been a long pending demand of many governments.

On right to compensation, the draft Bill said that every pesticide sold to a farmer, producer, stockist, distributor, retailer or pest control operator, as the case may be, shall disclose the expected performance, efficacy or safety of such pesticide under given conditions.

And, if the pesticide fails to provide the expected performance or causes any harm to human or animal health or damage to the environment by use of that pesticide, then, the farmer or the affected person may claim compensation from the manufacturer or distributor or stockist or retailer or pest control operator, as the case may be, under the provisions of the Consumer Protection Act.

Industry players said that burden of spurious pesticide has once again passed on to the Registration Committee (RC) which is set to expanded under the new Bill.