[W]hile the government wanted to keep prices low for Indian farmers, as [the South Asia Biotechnology Centre] points out, the illegal HT [(herbicide-tolerant) cotton] seeds are selling at between Rs 1,200 and Rs 1,500 per pack—if you take the mid-point of this, the seeds are selling at 1.7 times Monsanto’s Bollgard II ones.
If farmers were paying so much, it is because they felt the seeds would help increase productivity by reducing the cost of weeding in quite the same manner that Bollgard II did. It is because of Bollgard I and then II that India’s cotton production tripled from 13 million bales in 2002-03 to 35 million bales in 2016-17, and that is what, at one point, made India the world’s largest exporter of cotton.
Read full, original post: Monsanto vs illegal seeds: Illegal ones selling at 1.7x show farmers value technology