In cotton fields, policy is undoing what science built. That’s the challenge for the Cotton Productivity Mission

In April 2026, the Union Cabinet approved the Mission for Cotton Productivity with an outlay of Rs 5,659 crore, to run from 2026-27 to 2030-31. The intent is to raise lint productivity from 441 kg per hectare (in triennium ending (TE) 2025-26) to 755 kg/ha by 2031. But to understand whether this mission can succeed, it is worth recalling where India once stood and how deep the crisis in cotton fields runs.

In 2002, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee approved the commercial cultivation of Bt cotton as cleared by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC). At the time, he said: “The next big revolution that is unfolding in the world is the biotechnology revolution. This is going to touch the lives of ordinary people in ways that we cannot even fully imagine today. We must not lag behind others in this revolution. India should aspire to be one of the leaders of this revolution. We must plant its healthy saplings in different parts of the country so that we can reap their fruits soon.”

India did not lag behind. For a decade, it led. The first Bt hybrids incorporating the cry1Ac gene were approved to resist the bollworm complex. By 2006, GEAC had approved Bollgard II, a second-generation hybrid with two stacked genes. The results were unambiguous. Cotton production rose from 13.6 million bales in 2002-03 to 39.8 million bales in 2013-14, a 193 per cent increase. Annual output grew at 10 per cent, and area expanded by 56 per cent, from 7.6 million hectares (mha) to 11.9 mha. Yields improved by 88 per cent, from 302 kg/ha to 566 kg/ha. India became the largest producer and second-largest exporter of cotton. A technology decision taken by Vajpayee triggered an agricultural revolution. But thereafter, the policies by successive governments, both at the state and central levels, undid what science had built.

After Bollgard II, Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech (MMB) India developed the next generation: Bollgard II with Roundup Ready Flex, and Bollgard III, incorporating three stacked genes with herbicide-tolerant traits designed to address evolving pest resistance and rising weed-management costs. But they were not released.

What killed them was a sequence of price-control decisions that made seed innovation commercially unviable. In 2006, Andhra Pradesh imposed a Maximum Retail Price of Rs 750 per packet, less than half the prevailing price of Rs 1,600, of which Rs 1,250 had been charged by MMB as trait fee. Maharashtra and Gujarat swiftly matched the cap. In 2015, the Centre formalised this through the Cotton Seed Price Control Order, slashing the trait fee by 74 per cent from Rs 186.95 to Rs 49 per packet. In 2018, the national retail price was cut further to Rs 740. By 2020, the trait fee had been abolished entirely.

The consequence was direct. Faced with unfriendly regulation, Monsanto withdrew Bollgard II-RRF from GEAC consideration. Meanwhile, advanced agricultural economies routinely plant Bollgard 3 ThryvOn with XtendFlex, a platform combining three-gene caterpillar protection, built-in biological defence against sucking pests, and tolerance to three separate herbicide groups simultaneously. Brazil, where 92 per cent of cotton is rainfed, has deployed technology and seed innovation to the point where 60 per cent of cotton-planted area supports a second crop within the same agricultural year.

Today, India is not a leader of the biotechnology revolution in agriculture. It’s not even a serious participant.

Look at the productivity of cotton: Australia: 2,340 kg/ha; China: 2,311 kg/ha; Brazil: 1,943 kg/ha, and the United States: 976 kg/ha. These are lint yields for the TE 2025-26, reported by the International Cotton Advisory Committee. And India, which has the largest cotton-growing area in the world (11 million hectares), has a yield of just 441 kg/ha. The gap between India and its competitors is a precise measure of the gap in technology adoption, research investment, and regulatory ambition.

What is painful to see is that since 2014-15, production has declined at an average annual rate of 2 per cent. Had India merely continued on the production trajectory established between 2002 and 2014, cotton output in 2026 would have reached 65.3 million bales. The actual figure in 2025-26 is 29 million bales. The gap, 36.3 million bales, is the accumulated cost of a decade of policy failure. India went from a net cotton exporter to importing 4 million bales in 2025-26. It won’t take long for India to become a large importer of cotton if business as usual continues.

It is against this backdrop that one needs to evaluate the Cotton Productivity Mission. The Mission’s intent is welcome, but does it have the technology that global giants provide? The simple answer is “no”. How it will achieve the productivity target of 755 kg/ha by 2031 remains to be seen. And even if it does, it would still leave India at less than half of what Brazil, China, and Australia have achieved today. How will it compete with them?

Developing new seed varieties requires years of investment in plant breeding, biotechnology, and trait research, followed by a lengthy biosafety regulatory process with no guarantee of commercial approval. Without a policy framework that ensures adequate returns on that investment, private companies have no rational basis for undertaking it. Price controls that compress trait fees to zero do not merely limit profits; they eliminate the incentive to innovate at all.

The government, therefore, faces a clear choice. Either it restores the intellectual property framework that allows private innovators to recover their costs, which means revisiting the Cotton Seed Price Control Order, or it commits to funding public sector R&D at a scale sufficient to fill the gap the private sector has vacated. What is not sustainable is the current arrangement, where price controls suppress private innovation, public R&D is chronically underfunded, and farmers are left with dated technology. Can the Cotton Productivity Mission undo this policy damage? Only time will tell.

Gulati is distinguished professor, Gupta a research associate, and Juneja a senior fellow at ICRIER. Views are personal