New Delhi: Reports from China that genetically modified Bt cotton damaged the environment have alarmed the environmentalists who on June 5 demanded the Prime Minister's intervention for a high-level inquiry into the Bt cotton approval in the country.

"Authorities so far had been using the example of China to push in an untested environmentally-risky genetically modified technology of Bt cotton," Devinder Sharma from the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, an NGO comprising agricultural scientists, bio-technologists, farmers and environmentalists, said.

"It has now become apparent that the Department of Bio-technology/ Indian Council of Agricultural Research was in league with the multinationals in pushing in a faulty technology into the country," Sharma alleged.

Urging the Prime Minister to institute a high-level enquiry into the "dubious role" of DBT in supporting, promoting and hastily pushing the controversial genetically modified (GM) crops, the forum in a release said the commercial approval of the Bt cotton has paved the way for influx of a large number of GM crops in the country. It also demanded removal of secretary, DBT, for "promoting the unjust cause of the multinationals and private seed companies".

With the study by Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences in China stating that Bt cotton plant harms the population of natural parasites of bollworm and seems to encourage other pests have consolidated the fears being raised by scientists and environmentalists world over about the GM crops, Sharma said.

PTI