Cabinet nod to Pesticides Management Bill

The government on Wednesday approved a bill to regulate the pesticide business that would make it mandatory to share all data about it with farmers and also compensate them for crop loss in the case of sub-standard products.

The Pesticides Management Bill, 2020 will be introduced in the ongoing Budget Session of Parliament, I&B Minister Prakash Javadekar told reporters here after a meeting of the Union Cabinet.

He said the bill has provisions that make it mandatory for all pesticide manufacturers to be registered with relevant authorities and even regulate advertisements.

Javadekar said farmers would also be empowered to get all information as the data would be in open source and in all languages.

“More importantly he will know about the strength and weakness of pesticides, the risk, and alternatives and this will be an open data in digital format also,” he said.

The Bill also intends to promote organic pesticides. It will regulate pesticide-related advertisements to prevent manufacturers from making false claims about their products.

“If there is any loss due to the low quality of pesticides, then the Bill also includes a provision to provide compensation. It is a unique feature of the Bill. The penalty collected from the manufactures/dealers would be used to form a central fund," said Javadekar.

The pesticide sector is currently governed by rules formulated in 1968 which required to be re-written, Javadekar said.