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Ecology & Environment
Mahesh

05/08/25 10:16 AM IST

How India’s pesticide market is changing

In News 
  • India’s organised domestic crop protection chemicals market is valued at roughly Rs 24,500 crore.
Market for herbicide 
  • The largest segment within that is insecticides (Rs 10,700 crore), followed by herbicides (Rs 8,200 crore) and fungicides (Rs 5,600 crore).
  • Much of that is controlled by multinational companies: Bayer AG (which has an estimated 15% market share), Syngenta (12%), ADAMA (10%), Corteva Agriscience (7%) and Sumitomo Chemical (6%). While Bayer is German, Corteva is from the US and Sumitomo is Japanese, the Basel (Switzerland) and Ashdod (Israel)-headquartered Syngenta and ADAMA respectively are both owned by the Chinese state-owned Sinochem Holdings Corporation.
  • The herbicide segment has Indian players, too, such as Dhanuka Agritech (estimated 6% share) and Crystal Crop Protection Ltd (CCPL: 4%). CCPL recently purchased the rights to Ethoxysulfuron, a herbicide used against broad-leaved weeds and sedges in rice and sugarcane, from Bayer AG for sales in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Southeast Asian countries.
The growth driver
  • Weeds, unlike insect pests and disease-causing pathogens, don’t directly damage or destroy crops. Instead, they compete with them for nutrients, water and sunlight.
  • Yield losses happen because the crops are deprived of these essential resources. Besides growing at their expense, weeds sometimes even harbour pests and pathogens inflicting further harm.
  • By keeping their fields free from weeds, farmers can ensure that the benefits of the fertilisers and irrigation water they give go to the crops and not these unwanted plants.
  • Weed control has traditionally been through manual removal by hand or simple lightweight short-handled tools with flat blades such as khurpi.
  • There are also power weeders with 3-10 horsepower engine capacity that can be run between rows of standing crops to remove weeds in and around those spaces.
Manual Weeding
  • But manual weeding is time-consuming, with a labourer taking 8-10 hours to cover one acre. And since the weeds regrow, the process has to often be repeated during the crop’s lifecycle.
  • According to the Labour Bureau’s data, the all-India daily wage rate for plant protection workers averaged Rs 447.6 in December 2024, as against Rs 326.2 five years ago.
  • More than the cost though, labour isn’t available when required by the farmer.
  • Power weeders take only 2-3 hours per acre, but aren’t effective in pulling out weeds with deep roots or growing within densely planted crop areas.
  • That’s where herbicides come in. The demand for these chemicals is growing mainly on the back of rising agricultural labour scarcity; the number of people in rural India prepared to do this work of bending, digging and uprooting plants for long hours are getting fewer by the day.
  • In other words, herbicides have become more like tractors and other labour-saving farm machinery – a substitute for manual weeding.
Need for Fungicides,insecticides & Herbicides
  • Farmers generally spray insecticides and fungicides only when they physical observe and assess the pest population or disease incidence to be significant enough to impact crop yield and quality/marketability.
  • There’s a certain so-called economic threshold level, where the cost of controlling the pest/disease using chemicals is justified by the extent of anticipated crop loss.
  • In herbicides, too, farmers tend to mostly spray only after the weeds appear and are seen, i.e. “post-emergence”.
  • In recent times, farmers have also been resorting to prophylactic application of “pre-emergent” herbicides around or just after crop sowing.
  • These stop the weeds from coming out, helping keep the field clean from the start.
  • Alternatively, they may use “early post-emergent” herbicides to control weeds at the crop’s initial sensitive growth stage.
  • In both cases, the spraying is preventive, as opposed to being reactive. Out of the estimated Rs 1,500-crore paddy herbicide market, the “pre-emergent” sub-segment accounts for roughly Rs 550 crore.
  • That share is about a fifth in the Rs 1,000-crore market for wheat herbicides.
  • The “pre-emergent” and “early post-emergent” spaces are clearly the ones leading the growth, as farmers increasingly opt for timely and smart weed control amid rising labour shortages.
Monopoly Concerns
  • Unlike seeds and fertilisers – where there are enough Indian public as well as private sector players – the crop protection chemicals industry is practically a multinational monopoly.
  • There are some Indian companies, nevertheless, that are attempting to break through, by acquiring the rights to active ingredients and brands from big global majors or even introducing innovative formulations.
  • CCPL, for instance, has collaborated with the Ohio (US)- based Battelle and Japan’s Mitsui AgriScience to develop a new paddy herbicide called ‘Sikosa’.
  • Containing two active ingredients, Bensulfuron-methyl and Pretilachlor, in a patented oil-dispersion formulation, ‘Sikosa’ spreads quickly in water and works well when sprayed within 0-3 days after transplanting.
  • With a single 500-ml bottle of this super spreader herbicide, farmers can control narrowleaf, broadleaf and sedge weeds in transplanted paddy. And the product cost is Rs 850-900 per acre, compared to Rs 2,000-plus with manual weeding.
  • But India is still some distance away from having a Sinochem Holdings Corporation.
Source- Indian Express 

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