Ministry of agriculture and farmers welfare has published and notified the licensing and formats for GM technology agreement guidelines, 2016.

As per the preamble, the guidelines have been published in order to provide an effective system for fixation of maximum sale price of cotton seeds to ensure their availability to the cotton farmers at uniform as well as fair, reasonable and affordable prices.

The guidelines, in particular, aim at ensuring access of GM Traits to all seed companies without any restraint and at the same time biotech trait development being adequately rewarded under the fair, reasonable and non-discriminative mechanism (FRAND mechanism).