The Pesticide Management Bill explained

Hey folks, Happy Sankranthi! Today's the festival of harvest and speaking of harvest, today, on 14th Jan 2026, we're talking about the Pesticide Management Bill. ⁠Book a FREE consultation with Ditto here⁠ https://ditto.sh/vx51ji

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello folks, you're tuned in if and shots daily. Happy Sankranthi, today is the festival of harvest and speaking of harvest, today we're talking about the pesticide management bill.

• 0:11Speaker 00

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• 0:54Speaker 00

  A lot of people in India still earn their living from agriculture and because farming sits at the centre of everything, there's a whole world built around it. Everything from tractors and seeds to fertilizers and crucially pesticides. Now these chemicals are in some side activity. India is the fourth largest producer of agrochemicals in the world after the US, Japan and China. We're also the third largest exporter, shipping 3.3 billion dollars in F I twenty-five. Now that's three times as much as what we exported a decade ago. Besides, pesticides are also part of how crops survive pests and diseases. Without them, a lot of food would never make it to from the fields to our plates. Yet for all that scale, India doesn't use a lot of pesticides compared to many other countries.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  For context, India uses about just 0.4 kilograms of pesticides per hectare, which is less than China's 1.83 kilos or even other countries like Brazil and Argentina. Now, you might think less chemicals are a good thing because you're getting cleaner produce, but that's not always how it works. Pests don't magically disappear just because fewer chemicals are used. Because when crops start getting damaged, farmers feel pressured to act fast. That often means using strongest sprays, using them more often or using them without clear guidance. And when these chemicals are handled badly, say with wrong labels, wrong doses or weak oversight, the harm doesn't stop at farms. It spills over into people's health.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  So, India ends up in a not so good situation. To put things into perspective, India records over 7,700 deaths from accidental and intentional pesticide poisoning every year. Put these facts together and what you essentially have is a paradox. A country that feeds more than a billion people, sells pesticides to the world, battles massive crop losses and poisoning deaths. And all of it is governed by an obsolete law return back in 1968, when India had far fewer people, far fewer pesticides and far less data. The original Insecticides Act was framed at a time when India looked very different from today. It was designed for an era with fewer people, food scarcity, fewer pesticide options and very little scientific data

• 3:05Speaker 00

  to tell us about health and environmental effects. It was never built for drone spraying, digital supply chains or export markets that reject entire consignments over microscopic traces of pesticide residue. Despite that, the law did establish some strong ideas for its time. For example, it required a mandatory registration for every pesticide manufactured. This made sure that nobody could just make and sell their own chemicals without proper documentation. And even if the registration was received, you'd need state licenses to make and sell them. Along with that, it had rules for some basic toxicity and safety checks. There were even separate provisions for what a manufacturer should do with expired products and how they should store and dispose of them.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Overall, it gave the government some power with regards to pesticides. But over time, when agriculture modernized, the law did. In the past two decades, we've seen a lot of changes in how India as a country sees and consumes food, which naturally means it changes how we grow it as well. Now, this mismatch started creating problems, some of which still linger today. There are fakes and counterfeit fertilizers entering the market every single year. Those chemicals come in direct contact with consumers who eat the produce grown from those substandard chemicals. Then there's the export hurdle. Chemicals being shipped abroad face higher regulations than back home, so if they fail testing, exporters end up facing rejections.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  But most importantly, the older laws don't have space for environmental risk assessments, digital traceability and even protection. of gear norms. This gap meant that everything from registration to inspection was still paper driven and manual. And with no national digital trade, tracking a pesticide from manufacturer to use is almost impossible. That is the gap the pesticide management bill is trying to fill. The new bill takes the fifty seven year old act into the digital era and introduces rules that make sense with today's agriculture. To start with, the bill creates two central bodies, a central pesticides board for scientific guidance and strengthened registration committee that decides what gets approved, renewed or rejected. Unlike the nineteen sixty eight act, which only broadly mentioned safety and efficacy,

• 5:11Speaker 00

  the new framework spells out clear scientific criteria, environmental impact, toxicity, residue behavior, human exposure risk, and even how the product behaves under India's diverse climate conditions. But of all the new rules, the biggest shift is digitization. Every pesticide, whether imported, manufactured or sold, must now be digitally registered. This data feeds into a national pesticide registry, a central database that traces a pesticide through its entire life cycle. Instead of paper files sitting in different state offices, regulators can now track where a product was made, how much was produced, where it was shipped and who sold it. For an industry historically plagued by fakes and spurious products, this level of

• 5:54Speaker 00

  transparency is a game changer. The bill also tightens rules around labeling, packaging, transport and disposal. Labels must be clearer, packaging more standardized, and expired products must be collected and disposed of following stricter norms. Testing labs need accreditation, which means farmers are far less likely to end up with ultrated or poor quality chemicals. Another important addition is worker and farmer safety. For the first time, the law acknowledges the need for protective care, training and safe handling norms. It also builds a framework to monitor pesticide poisoning cases, something the nineteen sixty eight act never elaborated clearly. States also get more power. They can temporarily ban a pesticide or a specific batch for up to a year if they detect problems.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Penalties for misbranded, substandard or spurious pesticides go up sharply. And enforcement officers have clearer authorities to suspend or cancel licenses. The pesticide management bill of 2025 tries to turn a scattered, paper-driven system into a transparent, digitally traceable one. It doesn't change the core idea of registration though, that existed even in 1968. What it changes is everything around it. How pesticides are approved, how they move through the market, how they're monitored, and how violations are punished. But even with all these upgrades, the new bill isn't without gaps. Its language on risk reduction is soft, asking regulators to merely strive to minimize harm rather than mandating it.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  The states meanwhile can only issue temporary bans for up to a year and still lack the power to tailor pesticide rules to their own ecological needs. The bill brings in digital systems, but it doesn't address how small dealers or farmers will adapt to it. Sure, it might not answer every question, but for the first time in over five decades, India is rewriting the rulebook for the chemicals that touch our soil, our crops, and eventually our plates. It may not close every gap, but it finally starts to bridge the distance between where Indian agriculture is and where its laws need to be.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Thank you for listening to today's episode. And if you want to share your feedback or suggestions, do drop us an email to [email protected]. Until next time.