Genetic engineering promises big benefits for this humble vegetable Baingan bharta in North India, begun bhaja in Bengal, vaangi bhaat or bharleli vaangi in Maharashtra, katrikai sambar in the South... but the bad news is that one pest can spoil them all. The villain of the piece is the fruit and shoot borer (fsb), a larva that emerges from eggs laid in the stem of the plant, then bores its way into the brinjal itself - and ruins it. "There is no pesticide that can kill this destructive creature once it enters the fruit," says P. Balasubramanian, director, plant molecular biology centre, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (tnau), Coimbatore. Ergo, the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (absp n), South Asia, which involves a number of Indian partners, including tnau, to find a solution to the problem. "There are eight products on which active testing is going on, or which are about to be introduced in the market," says K. Vijayaraghavan, regional co-ordi-nator for South Asia of the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, which is co-ordinating the project under the aegis of the United States Agency for International Development (usaid). The first of these promises to be the humble brinjal, now genetically engineered to create its own fsb-resistance mechanism, and is awaiting statutory clearance. This is the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) gene CrylAc, a protein that provides in-built resistance. Tested for safety "Before the multi-locational field trials and those conducted by icar (Indian Council of Agricultural Research, an absp ii partner), we have fed it to rats and rabbits at independent animal testing labs," explains Bharat R. Char, principal scientist of the Jalna, Maharashtra-based Maha- rashtra Hybrid Seeds Co Ltd (mahyco), the private sector partner that has put the fsb-resistant brinjal through a series of tests for both efficacy and safety. "It has then been tried on fish, goats, chicken and lac-tating cows, and found safe." While the Bt brinjal resists fsb, CrylAc does not cause any significant difference to non-destructive and beneficial pests. And as far as human consumption is concerned, the protein does not survive cooking of any kind (roasting, deep- or shallow-frying and boiling) because it is heat-sensitive. Even so, the Health Ministry has made a strong case to address safety conditions. absp ii, launched in 2002 with 50 consortium partners from the US, Europe, Asia and Africa, is focussed on public-sector engagement, says Vijayaraghavan. This is so that basic varieties can be made available to large, farmers, who can then stock their own seeds; private companies tend to concentrate on hybrids, which cost a lot and need to be replenished for every planting, mahyco has helped the other partners - Indian Institute of Vegetable Research in Varanasi (which is icar's biotechnology department), four agricultural universities and icrisat - create the varieties, while coming up with hybrids for its own commercial purposes. The project has had successes with diverse crops like potato, rice, sunflower, groundnut, tomato, papaya and banana, says Vijayaraghavan, who is also chairman of the Hyderabad-based Sathguru Management Consultants, which supplies to the project's South Asia office. It has now worked for seven years in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines with brinjals, which are grown predominantly in these countries, with Asia accounting for more than 12 per cent of the global area under this crop. The fsb-resistant gene, which mahyco has donated to absp ii, has the potential to almost double the Indian brinjal farmers' productivity from 16 tonnes per hectare (tph) to 30 tph, besides preventing the current wastage of almost 70 per cent of the crop. "Even if half our farmers adopt this, it means a total benefit of over Rsl,000 crore," says Vijayaraghavan. The farmers would also save on pesticide, Bala-subramanian explains. "They spray the crop 50 to 60 times during its six-month life, which costs them a lot -besides the harm it does to us," he says. Adds Char of mahyco, "The marketable yield can be more than doubled over conventional hybrids, and even more over open-pollinated varieties." While the resource-constrained small farmer can get the Bt brinjal seed free from the tnau campuses and agricultural science centres, richer ones can buy the high-yielding varieties through mahyco's channels.