The first Telangana Annual Seed Festival, Vitthanala Panduga, will take place from April 4-6 in Kadthal, highlighting farmers' ongoing struggles with seed access and the challenges of high-interest loans
Published Apr 01, 2025 | 7:01 PM ⚊ Updated Apr 01, 2025 | 7:01 PM
Telangana's first ever Seed Festival
Synopsis: The first Telangana Annual Seed Festival, Vitthanala Panduga, will be held from April 4 to 6 in Kadthal, Hyderabad, addressing farmers’ ongoing struggles with accessing seeds. The event will focus on native seed conservation, sustainable practices, and equitable sharing. Experts emphasise the challenges of seed quality and availability, exacerbated by the rise of hybrids, urging collective action for seed sovereignty
The first Telangana Annual Seed Festival—Vitthanala Panduga—will be held from April 4 to 6 at the Earth Centre, Anumaspalli, Kadthal, Hyderabad, and will take a close look at the problems farmers face in accessing seeds.
This has remained an unsolved problem plaguing farmers in Telangana for years. Standing in long queues with cash procured from private moneylenders—often with great difficulty and at high interest rates—farmers do not know when this problem will end for good.
Explaining the purpose of the seed festival at a curtain-raiser media conference in Hyderabad on Tuesday, 1 April, Leela Laxma Reddy, President of the Council for Green Revolution, Hyderabad, and Dr. (Prof.) Dhonti Narasimha Reddy, Policy Expert – Legal Framework on Seed Sovereignty, said that the event will focus on native seed conservation, sustainable use of seeds, and fair and equitable sharing of seeds among farmers and their benefits.
“Our heritage of seeds, germplasm, and biodiversity—including agro-diversity and related knowledge—can best be conserved as a collective common. The proposed festival catalyses non-governmental, governmental, and independent initiatives on seed conservation, knowledge, breeding, and sharing across the state of Telangana and India,” they said.
The problems with seeds are deep-rooted and extending into new areas. “It is not just the availability of seeds on time. It is also not just about the quality of seeds. Good quality seeds, with good germination potential, are becoming rare as the number of hybrids increases,” they said.
On the other hand, seed prices are rising every year, burdening farmers and increasing cultivation costs. Farmers are at the mercy of a network of ‘gullible’ officials, seed traders, commission agents, and seed companies. There are administrative, economic, environmental, management, policy, and legal issues at play. Pricing, quantity, and quality of seeds are major concerns, with little government regulation. There is no seed policy either, at both the central and state levels.
Presently, germplasm is gravely compromised and targeted by profit-hungry big industries and capital, at the cost of common people’s basic life-support needs. By capitulating to Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) on life forms and plant/crop varieties, access to our rich heritage of crop germplasm and the benefits accruing from it have largely been cornered by a few big multinational corporations, while sharing between communities has declined.
Around 2012, The Wall Street Journal broke news of what may well be called ‘The Great Gene Bazaar’. It reported that the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) would offer MNCs around 400,000 (seed) varieties of native germplasm, audaciously adding that ICAR would even be willing “to accept a small share of the profit!” The narrow market view—lobbied by large corporations for carving out exclusionary Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) over our collective genetic wealth—must be rejected.
It is no secret that agribusiness MNCs promote unsustainable monocultures of Genetically Modified (GM) crops and commercial hybrids—grown with high inputs of increasingly expensive and scarce fossil-fuel energy, chemicals, and water—leaving a trail of toxicity and greenhouse gases. Instead, we need biodiverse, self-reliant ecological farming with locally evolved or adapted, open-pollinated seeds, providing wholesome yields in a sustainable and healthy manner.
“We need to protect the sanctity of our genetic and ecological commons—held in collective trusteeship for shared benefit and for passing on to future generations. We need to promote agricultural diversity and related knowledge, free from any exclusionary IPRs. We also need to assert the rights of our farmers to simplified, facilitated access to our many thousands of crop varieties in national and international germplasm banks, originally collected from our own farmlands, and having evolved through the cumulative innovations, adaptations, and selections of many generations of our farmers,” they said.
They added that the proposed ‘Telangana Seed Festival’ is thus an endeavor and appeal for a united front and campaign, reflecting shared concerns. The event is expected to lay the foundation for ongoing sharing and cooperation—for wider dissemination of our seed wealth and biodiversity-related knowledge for inclusive, ecological self-reliance in harmony with nature, and for sustained public pressure to correct policies toward this purpose.
(Edited by Ananya Rao)
