The seed war: How India's farmers fought PepsiCo — and what the Supreme Court got wrong

By Bharat Dogra 

In the sun-baked potato fields of Gujarat, a quiet revolution was taking root. Nine smallholder farmers, tilling land their families had worked for generations, found themselves staring down a multinational giant. PepsiCo India Holdings had come for them — not for their land, not for their water, but for their seeds.

The battle that unfolded would stretch across seven years, three courts, and the conscience of a nation. And when India's highest court finally spoke, the words left a bitter taste in the mouths of those who had fought longest and hardest.

This is the story of Kavitha Kuruganti, a farmer rights activist who refused to let corporate lawyers rewrite the laws of the land. And it is the story of a legal system that, in the end, could not quite see the forest for the patents.

The Knock on the Door

It began, as these things often do, with a sting operation.

In 2018 and 2019, PepsiCo sued at least nine potato farmers in Gujarat, claiming they had infringed on the company's intellectual property rights. The corporation — which had secured plant variety registration for its potato strain in 2016 — demanded over one crore rupees in damages from each farmer. Undercover operatives had posed as buyers, gathering evidence against men whose only "crime" was saving and sharing seeds, as farmers had done for ten thousand years.

"Pepsi behaved as though it had a patent right in its hands," says Kuruganti, who has spent decades on the frontlines of India's seed rights movement. "As is the case in the USA where companies like Monsanto have sued and jailed many farmers."

But India, she insists, is not the USA. And that distinction matters more than most people realize.

A Law Like No Other

To understand why Kuruganti fought so hard, one must understand the law she was fighting for.

In 2001, India's Parliament passed the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act (PPV&FR Act) — a unique "sui generis" law that stands apart from the patent regimes of the West. Where patent law treats seeds as corporate property, the PPV&FR Act recognizes a simple, revolutionary truth: the vast diversity of seeds cultivated across India's farmlands is the legacy of countless generations of farmers, including women farmers who saved, shared, and exchanged varieties with "wisdom, skills, commitment, creativity and love."

The Act's Section 39(1)(iv) grants farmers sweeping rights over protected varieties, including the right to sell seeds — provided they remain unbranded. It is, in essence, a legal acknowledgment that farmers are not thieves of their own heritage.

The original 1999 Bill had been far more restrictive, seeking to confine farmers' rights to "commercial produce" while stripping away control over the seeds themselves. Activists like Kuruganti fought back. The 2001 statute emerged with an entire new chapter on farmers' rights — a rare legislative victory against the tide of corporate expansion.

Which is precisely why PepsiCo's lawsuits felt like such a profound betrayal of the law's spirit.

The Campaign That Shook a Giant

The legal assault on Gujarat's potato farmers did not go unnoticed.

Beej Adhikaar Manch in Gujarat and ASHA-Kisan Swaraj at the national level launched an intense public campaign. The optics were devastating for PepsiCo: a 200 billion corporation suing subsistence farmers over potatoes. By May 2019, PepsiCo buckled, withdrawing all cases unconditionally.

But Kuruganti was not satisfied. To her, the withdrawal was a tactical retreat, not a surrender. The real problem remained: PepsiCo still held its certificate of registration, and nothing prevented the company from returning to court whenever it pleased.

In December 2021, she filed a Revocation Application under Section 34 of the PPV&FR Act, arguing on multiple grounds — including Section 34(h), which allows revocation when registration violates "public interest." The Authority ruled in her favor, canceling PepsiCo's certificate.

PepsiCo appealed to the Delhi High Court. A single-judge bench upheld the revocation. The company appealed again. A division bench reversed the decision in January 2024. (One of those judges would later resign amid an "unexplained cash-at-home" scandal.)

Kuruganti took her fight to the Supreme Court.

The Hearing That Raised Hope

On August 5, 2026, something remarkable happened inside the Supreme Court.

The Bench pointedly asked PepsiCo's counsel why the company had sued the farmers in the first place. The answer, delivered openly in court, was as blunt as it was damning: the lawsuits were a bid to tackle competitors. The company's own written submissions, Kuruganti notes, reflected this motive repeatedly.

Here, laid bare, was what activists had long argued: the litigation was not about protecting innovation. It was about eliminating competition. A classic SLAPP suit — Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation — dressed up in IPR clothing.

Even more promising, the Bench took cognizance of Section 39(1)(iv), the farmers' rights provision. And under questioning, PepsiCo's counsel stated that the company would allow farmers to enjoy their rights "to the fullest extent."

Hope flickered. Perhaps, finally, the highest court would recognize what was truly at stake.

The Judgment That Fell Short

The Supreme Court's verdict, when it came, landed like a dull thud.

The Bench ruled that suing farmers under Section 28 for IPR infringement — as PepsiCo had done — did not constitute a violation of public interest under Section 34(h). The registration would stand.

"The judgment is concluding that farmers being sued by IPR holders is not a matter of violation of public interest," Kuruganti says, her voice carrying the weight of the disappointment. "Which was the main ground for my revocation application."

What stings most is not merely the loss, but what the court chose not to see.

"It is particularly disappointing that the Bench did not see through the modus operandi of a multinational corporation like Pepsi against smallholder farmers," Kuruganti says. "This vexatious litigation against farmers, in a SLAPP mode, was not taken cognisance of despite it being part of written submissions and the oral arguments!"

The court's record, she notes, does not even mention PepsiCo's August 5th commitment to respect farmers' rights under Section 39(1)(iv). A concession extracted in open court vanished from the final text.

The Bigger Picture

To frame this as a single legal defeat is to miss the forest for the potato plants.

For decades, multinational corporations have been tightening their grip on the global food system, and seeds are the chokepoint. Assisted by patents over life forms — once unthinkable — and technologies like genetic modification, a handful of companies now control an alarming share of the world's seed supply.

"The main aim of these multinational companies, broadly speaking, is longer-term huge increase of profits," Kuruganti argues. "And this is best achieved by increasing control over the seeds."

That control comes with cascading consequences. Farmers are pushed toward expensive, proprietary seeds engineered to work with specific herbicides and chemical inputs. Farming grows costlier. Monocultures replace diversity. Ecological destruction follows. And the ancient practice of saving, sharing, and exchanging seeds — the very foundation of agricultural self-reliance — is criminalized.

There have also been disturbing reports of seed multinationals accessing the genetic diversity of the Global South through deeply unfair means, effectively privatizing a commons built over centuries.

India's PPV&FR Act was meant to be a bulwark against this tide. The Supreme Court's ruling, activists fear, may have cracked that wall.

The Fight Continues

Kuruganti is not done.

"We will keep an active watch, as we did in the past too, to protect our farmers' rights over any seed variety," she asserts.

And she is not alone. Across India and the world, a movement is growing — one that insists seeds are not widgets to be patented but heritage to be protected. A system based on "farm-based seeds conservation, protecting diversity, sharing and exchange" is not naive idealism, its advocates argue. It is survival.

The Supreme Court judgment, Kuruganti insists, "must be seen only as a temporary setback."

Because some things run deeper than court rulings. The wisdom of generations of farmers. The resilience of communities that have survived droughts, famines, and empires. And the stubborn, undeniable truth that you cannot patent ten thousand years of human ingenuity without eventually facing the people who created it.

PepsiCo may have won its certificate back. But the seeds — the real ones, saved in mud-caked jars and shared across fence lines, adapted to local soils and local needs — remain where they have always been: in the hands of farmers.

And there, despite everything, they will stay.

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The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Saving Earth for Children, Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071, and India's Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food. His website is bharatdogra.in and his YouTube channel is Bharat Dogra | Save Earth Campaign