Crop Protection Chemicals: A Regulatory Revolution is Underway in India

As the fourth largest producer of agrichemicals globally, India has moved forward by shifting away from its traditional regulatory regimes for agrichemical registration by focusing more on its Prime Minister’s “Make in India” slogan.

Agrichemicals have been treated as a regulated commodity in India since the introduction of the Insecticides Act, 1968 and Insecticides Rules,1971. These regulations have been under an overall amendment in the last few months starting with the 371st Meeting of the Central Insecticides Board & Registration Committee (CIB&RC) last year. The CIBRC is the apex body under the Ministry of Agriculture for regulating pesticides in India.

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From the first years of the old regime through the 1990s, Indian agrichemical regulation was equally liberal to imports and indigenous manufacturing. With more farmer education and understanding of business intelligence, one of the Indian pesticide business associations challenged the allowance of formulation imports without registering its technical, which requires submission of all data by the registrant to ensure the product quality from a safety use aspect.

With the passage of time, a new registration provision for Indian technical manufacturing has been introduced, opening the way for many new crop protection products for indigenous manufacturers and making them available to farmers at more competitive prices. Such development has really supported farmers’ input costs and has given them access to better farm technologies.

Through phases, CIB&RC has established a liberal guideline for empowering its “me too” indigenous manufacturing, which requires only AMES Test (Tier 1), including an analytical test report and some packaging information. This has, of course, inspired many different registrants to get such registrations. It also encouraged many foreign investors to focus on India as a next generation manufacturing hub for agrichemicals to serve their global markets, too. The Indian agrichemical industry has welcomed such a government initiative, which will of course boom the industrialization, development, and employment in the Indian crop protection business segment.

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CIB&RC has already stopped all equivalence registrations in imports to stop possible further rate cutting through import sourcing for a possible technical manufacturing. CIB&RC has also stopped all formulation import registration of any product which is already registered for indigenous manufacturing to stimulate manufacturing in India. Second source of formulation import is also restricted for formulation import registration without registering the technical.

Finally, CIB&RC now has six provisions of indigenous manufacturing and four for imports, which reconfirms the clear motto of “Make in India”.

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