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In public domain

For about a decade, farmers' rights campaigners have complained that the government hides information on GM crops and a cloak of secrecy hides the goings-on. The Right to Information (RTI) Act is changing that, along with an interin Supreme Court order of November 8, 2006, which says all research data on GM seeds has to be made public. Rajesh Krishnan, head of Greenpeace's anti-GM campaign, says information about GM crop trials was earlier confined to government. "But with the RTI Act in force, we have access to locations where the trials are being conducted,' he says. Activists found out about the GM rice trial on Paramjit Singh's land in Haryana through RTI, which allows monitoring of GM trials. An official of seed company Mahyco says: "Now that there is transparency, the anti-GM lobby should ask questions, rather than taking the law into their hands.'

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