Does the disclosure of data affect commercial prospects of the crop?
The data in question is the biosafety assessments of a transgenic crop. The contention by the industry is that the data contains protocols, event Id information, data generated under biosafety studies, methods, testing locations and the kind. Apart from the inconceivable argument that is not separable, it is quite an erroneous claim that protocols which are stipulated by the government are sensitive business information; event Id’s which are anyway provided by the crop developers post the approval to the various laboratories under the Biosafety protocol and is now also one of the preconditions stipulated by the Supreme Court order for conducting field trials cannot be disclosed; methods for protein estimation and evaluation which have to be standardized methods that have been published in leading journals and accepted worldwide are actually secrets or that locations of field trials that are conducted, which need a prior permission from the panchayat or local administration officials of
