The Center has withdrawn the gazette notification of May 18 vide which it published and notified the licensing and formats for GM technology agreement guidelines, 2016. Said guidelines were 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, were aimed at ensuring access of GM traits to all seed companies without any restraint and at the same time at adequately rewarding bio-tech trait  under the fair, reasonable and non-discriminative mechanism (FRAND mechanism).