This was the second attack on the seed company, a subsidiary of the US seed
giant Cargill of Minneapolis, by members of Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sanha
(KRRS) – a local farmers’ association. Last December members of the group
ransacked Cargill’s office in Bangalore, destroying records and assaulting
two employees. Last week’s raid caused damage worth around 300 000 rupees (
£10 000), but construction is expected to be completed on
schedule.

The attacks are part of the KRRS campaign against proposals in the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on patenting of plants, seeds and genes. The
association wants the Indian government to stick with the Indian Patents Act
of 1970, which prohibits patenting of life forms. This will guard the
traditional rights of Indian farmers to produce, modify and sell their own
seeds, argues the KRRS.

M. D. Nanjundaswamy, an agricultural scientist and president of the KRRS,
says that multinational seed companies are gene thieves, buying in seed from
farmers, treating it and selling it back at a hefty profit. KRRS activists
allege that Cargill buys seeds from farmers for 3 rupees a kilogram,
processes them at a cost of not more than 5 rupees a kilogram and sells them
back to the farmers at 185 rupees a kilogram.

KRRS wants the government to ban any more foreign seed companies from
setting up shop in India, maintaining that farmers will come to depend on
these companies for seeds of their own native plants.

Cargill is surprised that it has been singled out for attack. It says it has
not patented any genes from indigenous Indian plants, nor has it exported
any seeds produced in India.

Until recently, India possessed a largely state-owned seed industry which
provided around 38 per cent of the seeds needed by Indian farmers.

The NRC has confirmed that ‘slight contamination’, not enough to pose
a hazard to human health, was found in 5 per cent of the material. Nevertheless,
it is treating the fencing as radioactive waste.

India’s Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) is investigating how the radioactive
cobalt-60 found its way into the fencing. The manufacturer, Katia Steel
Rolling Mills, in Calcutta, melts a mixture of local and imported scrap
iron. The AEC suspects that the imported scrap may be the culprit. ‘We do
not know yet from which country the radioactive scrap was imported,’ says
Padmanabha Iyengar, chairman of the AEC.

The only facility in India which produces cobalt-60 is the Bhabha Atomic
Research Centre in Bombay, which is under the direct control of the AEC.
The cobalt is used in medicine, research and industry. The commission denies
the possibility of any cobalt-60 from the Bhabha centre being the source
of contamination.

There is another theory that the cobalt-60 may come from the inner linings
of blast furnaces. The radioactive material is included in the linings as
a way of monitoring the degree of erosion. ‘Accidentally, if this source
is dislodged and falls into the melting iron, it contaminates the whole,’
says Iyengar.

Imports into India are not monitored for radioactivity. This has led
to allegations that the country is open to dumping of radioactive waste.
Iyengar says: ‘No such incident has come to light in India. After the Chernobyl
accident, there were allegations that radioactive butter was sent here.
We investigated and found no evidence of radioactivity.’ India, he says,
will monitor future imports for any radioactivity.

Thirteen of India’s 32 states and territories have naturally high levels
of fluoride in their water. An estimated 25 million people suffer from fluorosis
– chronic fluoride poisoning which leads to deformities of bones and mottling
of teeth. The National Technology Mission on Safe Drinking Water has already
started large-scale programmes of defluoridation. But the mission also identified
toothpaste as an extra, unnecessary source of fluoride.

India’s soil is rich in minerals that contain fluoride. The fluoride
washes into the water supply, which provides not only drinking water but
also one of the raw materials for the manufacture of toothpaste. Some manufacturers
add still more fluoride to their products. Young children tend to swallow
toothpaste, so they can be exposed to large amounts of fluoride.

In the US and Europe, fluorosis is rare. The upper limit on fluoride
in water in Europe is 1.5 parts per million; in India, according to Michael
Lennon at the University of Liverpool, the level may be as high as 10 ppm
in places.

In India last year the DTAB recommended changing the rules which govern
the composition of toothpaste, to limit their fluoride content to 1000 ppm
– and printing the warning on the tubes. When the Drug Controller of India
issued a draft notification of these changes in March last year, dentists
lobbied against them.

In the final version of the notification issued in April, the health
ministry dropped the clause about a health warning without consulting the
DTAB. At a meeting to review the situation last month, the health ministry
ignored findings from researchers at Madras Dental College, which showed
that if young children are exposed to fluoride, it accumulates in their
permanent teeth, making them mottled, pitted and sometimes perforating them.

Andezhath Kumaran Susheela, of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences
in New Delhi, has been working with the mission on safe drinking water.
He says: ‘Besides teeth, the fluoride also keeps piling up in bones . .
. which means that these children would certainly grow up to show signs
of fluoride toxicity.’

The World Health Organization has already cautioned against the use
of fluoride toothpastes by children under six in areas where fluorosis is
endemic. Kenya has banned advertisements for fluoride toothpaste on radio
and television.

In Sweden, fluoride-free toothpaste for children carries the health
department’s recommendation that children under four years old should use
toothpaste without fluoride. In Britain, dentists recommend that children
use only a small piece of toothpaste, the size of a pea, with each brushing.
Because fluoride levels in Britain’s drinking water are not excessively
high, there are rarely any problems, says Lennon.

Centchroman, which is also known as Saheli or ‘female friend’, is unlike
existing oral contraceptives because it is not based on steroid hormones.
It is one of a group of compounds called coumarins, the same family from
which the anticoagulant drug warfarin is derived. The compound was first
synthesised by a team led by Nitya Nand at the CDRI more than 20 years ago
and has been under development ever since. It was licensed by the Drug Controller
of India at the end of last year but is only now being marketed nationwide.

Researchers in the West are guarded about the pill and want to see more
data before they judge it. David Baird, professor of clinical research in
reproductive biology for Britain’s Medical Research Council at the Edinburgh
Royal Infirmary, says more studies are needed. On the data he has seen,
Centchroman has a higher failure rate than the conventional oestrogen-progestagen
pill, so he questions whether there is any advantage in developing another
drug that women will have to take for years.

According to the scientists at the CDRI, Centchroman works in an entirely
different way from both types of conventional oral contraceptive. The combined
oestrogen-and-progestagen pill and the progestagen-only pill both stop conception
by maintaining a constant level of synthetic hormone in the body, which
overrides the normal cycle. The combined pill suppresses ovulation; the
progestagen only pill makes the mucus in the cervix too thick for sperm
to pass through, and it also alters the lining of the uterus.

By contrast, say researchers at the CDRI, Centchroman does not disturb
the overall function of the pituitary gland or the ovaries. Instead, it
blocks oestrogen receptors in the lining of the uterus, so that the hormone
is unable to do its job of helping to prepare the uterus for receiving a
fertilised egg. In effect, Centchroman acts as a weak oestrogen. As a result,
the researchers believe, it upsets the delicate balance of hormones required
to make the uterus receptive while still allowing the menstrual cycle to
proceed normally.

Paul Van Look, head of research and development for the Human Reproduction
Programme at the World Health Organization in Geneva, says the WHO has followed
the development of Centchroman with interest. ‘We are awaiting results from
the widespread use of the drug to see whether it might be of benefit to
other countries.’

Van Look admits that he is puzzled by the way Centchroman works. An
antagonist of oestrogen, he says, would be expected to block not only the
oestrogen receptors in the uterus but also those in the pituitary. If the
pituitary receptors were blocked, then the drug would ultimately increase
the activity of the ovaries. This is because if the pituitary gland thinks
it has no oestrogen supply from the ovaries, it tells them to make more.
But the researchers in India say the mildly oestrogenic effect of Centchroman
‘fools’ the pituitary into thinking conditions are near normal.

Doctors in India are optimistic about the drug. They hope it will become
popular with women at a time when the national family planning programme
has suffered various setbacks. Some doctors believe that women have been
deterred from using conventional oral contraceptives because they feared
the possible side effects, such as weight gain and dizziness.

Centchroman, by contrast, seems to have none of these effects. Its only
drawback in trials covering 21 000 cycles in 2000 women is that around 8
per cent of the cycles were longer than normal. Centchroman’s failure rate
is lower than the condom’s but higher than the conventional pill’s according
to the data so far.