Caught in the crisp trap: The battle over seed sovereignty

By Raj Kumar Sinha* 

There was a time when farming was governed simply by the rhythm of the seasons—sowing, tilling, and harvesting. Today, Indian farmers are forced to navigate the labyrinth of complex legal volumes. The reason? The aggressive encroachment of multinational corporations into agriculture. Take, for instance, PepsiCo—a company reaping immense profits turning potatoes into chips—which legally locked down a proprietary potato variety for its supply chain. How are ordinary farmers supposed to survive this corporate maze?

The protracted legal feud between PepsiCo India Holdings and farm rights activist Kavitha Kuruganti, culminating in a recent Supreme Court verdict, has reignited a crucial national debate: seed sovereignty versus corporate plant monopolies. This is not merely a dispute between a corporate giant and a handful of potato growers. At its heart lies a foundational question for Indian agriculture: Who truly owns the seed? Is it the farmer who has saved, cultivated, and evolved it across generations, or the corporation holding a registration certificate?

​The Supreme Court bench, comprising Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran, declined to interfere with a Delhi High Court ruling, refusing to revoke PepsiCo’s registration of its potato variety. The Court did clarify that should PepsiCo initiate action against a grower, the farmer can assert rights under the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights (PPV&FR) Act, 2001—provided they prove their case falls within the statutory ambit.

This is precisely where Kavitha Kuruganti’s core objection lies. While the law grants farmers statutory protections, the burden of proof falls entirely on vulnerable farmers once dragged into court by deep-pocketed corporations. When litigation is deployed to suppress competition or intimidate growers, it ceases to be a private legal conflict; it becomes an urgent matter of public interest.

​The dispute traces back to PepsiCo registering a proprietary potato variety used for its Lay's brand in 2016. In 2018 and 2019, the corporation sued at least nine Gujarat farmers for alleged intellectual property infringement, demanding crippling damages. Facing fierce public backlash, PepsiCo withdrew the suits in May 2019.

​Yet the episode exposed an unsettling ambiguity: What becomes of a farmer's customary rights if a protected variety is found in their field? Kuruganti framed this not as isolated litigation, but as a systemic clash between statutory farmers' rights and corporate IPR, petitioning the PPV&FR Authority to revoke PepsiCo's registration.

​In December 2021, the Authority revoked PepsiCo's certificate. PepsiCo appealed, and while a single judge of the Delhi High Court initially upheld the revocation on select grounds in July 2023, a division bench overturned that order in January 2024, restoring PepsiCo’s monopoly. Kuruganti then moved the Supreme Court, whose latest verdict places the struggle in a new legal and social arena.

​The PPV&FR Act, 2001 is a cornerstone of Indian agricultural jurisprudence. It attempts a delicate dual mandate: incentivizing commercial breeders by granting exclusive rights to produce, market, and distribute protected varieties, while explicitly safeguarding the traditional right of farmers to save, use, sow, resow, exchange, share, or sell their farm-saved seeds.

​The Supreme Court’s verdict does not mark the end of the seed rights movement. Instead, the battleground shifts to translating paper rights into ground realities. Legal safeguards mean little if confined to courtrooms and legal treatises; farm unions must democratize legal literacy down to the village level so that cultivators understand precisely when and how their protections apply.

​As biotechnology, hybrid seeds, and corporate capital expand across Indian agriculture, indigenous seed systems and biodiversity face existential pressure. The farmer's challenge is to ensure that statutory rights do not remain dead letters in statute books, but function as living defenses in their fields.

​The next chapter of the PepsiCo dispute will likely be written not in the Supreme Court, but in village panchayats, grassroots collectives, legal aid clinics, and Parliament. The ultimate test will be how freely the Indian cultivator can exercise seed autonomy and how resolutely the state defends those rights.

​Securing the farmer's right over the seed is not merely about individual livelihood—it is vital to India’s food security, agricultural biodiversity, and the economic freedom of future generations.

---

*With Bargi Dam Displaced and Affected Union