Seeds determine what grows on India’s farms, how agriculture responds to shifting monsoons, how agro-biodiversity survives across landscapes, and how millions of cultivators secure livelihoods in a climate-stressed world. Yet India still governs seeds through an old statute, the Seeds Act, 1966, and the later Seeds (Control) Order, 1983. These were framed when public institutions bred most varieties and farmers saved seed as the main planting source. The seed sector has transformed since then. The law has not.

Over the past two decades, India has tried four times to rewrite the law – in 2004, 2010, 2019 and now 2025. Each attempt promised reform; none became law. The new draft Seeds Bill 2025, released in November, enters a landscape shaped by private corporations, hybrid markets, genetically modified (GM) and gene-edited crops, globalised trade and climate volatility. It is more sophisticated than the earlier drafts, yet does not address a familiar dissonance: whose interests should a seed law serve?

Where seed law reform began

The Seeds Bill 2004 arrived two years after Bt cotton, India’s first genetically modified crop, was approved. Bt cotton marked the arrival of GM technology and the rapid expansion of domestic and multinational seed firms. Seed was no longer just planting material; it had become a high-value proprietary technology. Regulation had to catch up.

The 2004 Bill proposed mandatory registration of seeds and allowed farmers to produce seed only if they met company-like standards. It even permitted provisional registration of GM seeds before full biosafety evaluation. All these provisions met with opposition from both farmers and independent experts.

The Bill clashed with the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights (PPV&FR) Act, 2001, which recognises farmers as breeders and rights-holders. Farmer organisations argued that the draft treated cultivators as violators rather than custodians. The Parliamentary Standing Committee (14^th Lok Sabha, 22^nd Report, 2006-07) flagged these contradictions. Following nation-wide opposition from farmers unions and experts, the Bill never went through.

From amendments to a new bill

It took four years, after the Parliamentary Standing Committee report, for the government to roll out 72 amendments, leading to the 2010 version of the Seed Bill. This draft removed the GM fast-track and strengthened exemptions for farmers’ rights to save, reuse, exchange and sell unbranded seed. It introduced compensation for seed failure but routed claims through the Consumer Protection Act that could force farmers into courts ill-suited for crop-loss cases. Farmer groups demanded a dedicated redress mechanism within the Seeds Act. This version, too, viewed farmers mainly as consumers of a formal seed market rather than co-creators of seed diversity.

The 2019 draft, this time a new Bill, was tabled after almost a decade of legislative paralysis. Earlier, the amended Seeds Bill, 2004 kept appearing on the Parliament list but was never taken up. Meanwhile, outside Parliament, seed politics stayed active: states pushed back against central control, farmers’ groups kept demanding compensation and price regulation, and long battles over Bt cotton seed prices and trait fees made it clear that seed governance could not remain frozen.

The 2019 draft reflected a new policy climate shaped by “ease of doing business.” It introduced “deemed registration,” allowing companies to sell seed while approvals were still pending, shifting risk entirely onto farmers. Compensation was still routed through consumer courts, and compulsory registration expanded space for private hybrids and imports. Small producers faced heavier compliance burdens. Resistance grew once again. This draft was soon withdrawn.

Technological upgrades, familiar gaps

The Draft Seeds Bill 2025 is the most technologically updated attempt so far. It brings digital traceability, QR codes, a National Seed Traceability Portal, standardised accreditation, Value for Cultivation and Use (VCU) trials and graded penalties. It even allows foreign trial data and certification agencies, without considering the fact that such trial data may be irrelevant for the diverse Indian agro-climatic conditions. There were also concerns raised about weakened biosafety safeguards.

These reforms respond to the reality that India’s formal seed industry, now valued at around ₹34,000 crores (₹340 billion), is dominated by the private sector, which controls about 70% of seed production. Public agencies hold the rest, while most staples – cereals, pulses and oilseeds – still come from farm-saved seed outside the formal market.

Meanwhile, substandard and spurious seeds continue to harm farmers. Farmers in at least 10 states have protested against spurious or sub-standard seeds, showing the problem is widespread. The government’s seed-testing data reinforces this scale – about 43,000 samples failed quality standards out of nearly 600,000 tested between 2022 and 2025, with states like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh recording thousands of “non-standard” seeds.

Stricter oversight and traceability are clearly needed. However, in the pre-legislative consultation call note, the government states that one of the objects of the Bill is to “decriminalise minor offences…promote ease of doing business and reduce compliance burden”. This surely marks a shift in emphasis. Earlier drafts prioritised quality control and fraud prevention; the 2025 draft adds market facilitation as an object. It is unusual to see “Ease of Doing Business” explicitly mentioned within the text of the Bill itself.

Compensation and federalism

One of the most persistent criticisms since 2004 has been the absence of a clear, farmer-friendly compensation mechanism. Penalties collected from violators go to the state, not to farmers. This simply means cultivators must approach consumer courts or depend on the “benevolence” of ad hoc state-level decisions, neither of which offer timely justice.

Agriculture policy expert Dr. G.V. Ramanjeneyulu of the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA) shares, “The Seeds Bill must be a law that protects farmers first, not one that merely facilitates business operations. It cannot remain silent on compensating farmers for losses caused by sub-standard seeds.”

Farmers’ Unions like the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) and the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) have called for nation-wide protests against the draft. As AIKS General Secretary Vijoo Krishnan notes, “When a seed fails, a farmer loses an entire season, not a product, yet the law protects the transaction, not the cultivator; compensation must be paid, and it must be automatic, timely, and cover both cultivation costs and lost yield, without forcing farmers through cumbersome legal processes.” CSA, SKM and AIKS have sent their detailed responses to the government.

Federal imbalance is another unresolved issue.  Agriculture is a state subject under India’s Constitution. Seed performance depends on local soils, rainfall, pest and disease pressures and farming systems. Yet the Bill centralises accreditation and registration, reducing the space for states to restrict varieties unsuitable for their regions. Telangana has publicly raised this issue. Kerala, in its official response, warns that the Bill centralises nearly all key functions – registration, accreditation, pricing, certification and rule-making – leaving states with little real authority despite agriculture being a state subject. Kerala argues that this structure violates federal principles and sidelines regional agro-ecological needs.

Community seed systems 

While seed law reform drifted for two decades, India witnessed a quiet but significant revival of Indigenous, heirloom and folk seed varieties, driven by farmers, women’s collectives, farmer groups, NGOs and community institutions. The varieties were revived, conserved and exchanged outside the formal markets. They operate with no intellectual property claims and with minimal or zero costs. This is not a marginal trend and this silent revolution cannot be overlooked.

Many of these farmers and groups are recognised through Genome Saviour Awards under the PPV&FR Act, and several individuals through national honours including Padma awards. Seed diversity blocks, community seed banks, seed festivals and exchange melas play their role in these efforts. These initiatives help maintain and supply varieties adapted to the local landscapes, protect genetic diversity and often supply planting material better suited to local stresses than commercial hybrids.

Yet the new draft Seeds Bill fails to explicitly recognise community seed systems as a distinct and growing sector. In the absence of such recognition, these decentralised systems risk being subject to licensing, registration and traceability requirements meant for commercial firms. Even simple branding by these groups to build trust around natural farming or traditional seeds risks being treated as commercial activity.

Seed rights advocates warn that all this could gradually push decentralised village-level systems to extinction, leading to further corporate consolidation in the seed sector. As Kavitha Kuruganti of the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA-Kisan Swaraj) cautions, “Seed regulation cannot pretend neutrality. When laws ignore farmers as breeders and custodians, they end up strengthening corporate seed systems while weakening the very community seed networks that sustain diversity.” ASHA has responded with a detailed critique, endorsed by several farmer leaders and organisations.

Prices and farmers’ rights missing

The draft is weak in price regulation. With the repeal of the Seeds (Control) Order, 1983, a key instrument for keeping prices in check will disappear. The Bill allows state intervention only in “emergent conditions.” Yet seed monopolies and price hikes are not rare events. States must retain the ability to act whenever pricing becomes unfair, not only during crises.

The Bill also remains misaligned with the PPV&FR Act, which recognises farmers as breeders, innovators and custodians of genetic resources, a legal instrument unique in global IP regimes. But the Seeds Bills keep positioning farmers as end-users in a licensed supply chain. The Parliament Standing Committee of 2006 had urged the government to fully operationalise the PPV&FR Act before the Seeds Bill, 2004, so as to ensure the harmony between the two. Two decades later, many farmer-centric provisions of PPV&FR remain unimplemented, while a contradictory Seed Bill is being pushed again.

After two decades and four drafts, the question is no longer how to improve drafting. It is deciding what a seed law is for. If it is meant to regulate the seed market, the 2025 draft, with QR codes, national portals and central oversight, fits that logic.

If it is meant to secure biodiversity, agro-ecological resilience and farmer livelihoods, then statutory compensation, price regulation, support for community seed systems and state-level powers, are essential.

Seeds are not industrial components. They are living, evolving entities shaped by climate, soil, culture and human ingenuity. A law that strengthens regulation but weakens the foundations that ensure diversity and sovereignty leaves agriculture exposed. A functional seed law will require India to fix that priority.

A seed system cannot be secured by law. It is secured by trust – by those who plant the seed, risk the harvest and live with the consequences. A QR code can trace a seed’s journey. It cannot restore a lost crop. With generations of their Indigenous knowledge, and the experience of the modern, farmers seem to have clearly delivered their verdict, once again: It’s a clear no to this Seeds Bill, 2025.

The author is a steering Committee member at Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA-Kisan Swaraj), a consultant at Asar Social Impact Advisors, and the director of Thirunelly Agri Producer Company (TAPCo), a farmer producer organisation based in Kerala.

Banner image: A farmer scatters seeds in an agricultural field. Image by Tushar Kadam via Pexels (CC0).

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Priyanka Shankar Editor

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