Chemicals in the Environment: A Conversation with Dr Donthi Narsimha Reddy

Hello everybody, welcome to day one of AAD 2025. Today we are joined by Dr. Narsimha Reddy, who is the visiting senior fellow at Impact Policy Research Institute. So we'll be talking about pesticides. So firstly, I wanted to understand what makes pesticides so much of a concern. Could you talk about that? Basically, chemical pesticides are built to kill. So they are designed to kill and they are designed to stay forever so that they can continue to kill the pests. So it could be insects or it could be bigger animals, something like that. So it was designed like that and initial pesticides were designed almost like a snake poison. So once it enters the body, it can damage all the organs, multi-organ failure. So that's a concern and we are using tons and tons of pesticides every year and they stay forever in the atmosphere, in the environment, in the water, in the soil. And in India, I feel the concern is more because one, we don't have a regulation and most of us are illiterate and have zero knowledge on pesticides and we don't have a medical establishment which learns and tries to give better and better treatment to poisons of victim, I mean victims of poisoning. So we are seeing a lot of pesticide poisoning in rural areas and people don't know why they are dying, why their children are dying, why their parents are becoming ill. So this I think looks very pathetic and that's simply because of pesticides. What are some of the other challenges that you see in terms of dealing with pesticide poisoning when we talk about liability and holding some company to account? Actually it begins with the medical establishment itself which responds almost on par with quacks. Like you know a pesticide poisoning victim comes to the hospital, usually they should be asking the patient what is the pesticide which has caused them this problem or they have to ask the attendant. So there it begins but none of the medical establishment do that. So the other issue which we are seeing is because of this, we don't have any proof or medical proof which we can link this particular illness or death with the particular pesticide. So that's one challenge. The second challenge is, as I mentioned, the epidemiology of Indian medical establishment is not developed. So we don't do post-mortems at all. So we don't know how a patient has died after ingestion of a pesticide accidentally or deliberately. So that again gives us a challenge how do we build a liability case on the companies which are introducing most hazardous pesticides. Could you talk about the legislation in the country and also like what needs to be done to address the issues that we are seeing right now with pesticides? India has only one law, pesticide regulation, Insecticide Act 1968. In fact that Act law itself came because prior to that we had a lot of poisoning cases, pesticide poisoning cases. So in 2006, I think somewhere when the Center for Science and Environment raised the issue of pesticide residues in Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, then the parliamentary committee came up and they said why are we using 66 pesticides which are banned outside and in India. So from there we started looking at this entire issue of regulation and government proposed an amendment, a new law in 2008. But that draft was not at all helpful the way we wanted it to be. So we lobbied and we stopped that bill from becoming a law and that is still there. So there have been several drafts so between the forces who want regulation of pesticides and forces who want to facilitate pesticides, I think there is a balance there and we are still trying to gather public opinion so that we can have more regulation or basically we need to reduce. So reduction and phase out kind of regulation we require and we are working on that. Thank you so much for taking the time.