Addressing the plenary session of the 86th Indian Science Congress here yesterday, Dr Chopra said apart from rice, cotton, brinjal and tobacco, varieties bred in future can resist insect and virus attacks. Another interesting possibility is the development of coffee with the typical South Indian flavour without caffeine, he quipped.

Secretary in the Union Department of Bio-technology, Dr Manju Sharma, said research centres funded by the department had successfully isolated a salinity-tolerant gene from B Junecea

and transferred it to tobacco and rice varieties. The gene would also let the plant tolerate high levels of zinc, she added.

Dr Sharma told newspersons later there was no need for any``fear psychosis'' in the minds of farmers in using genetically-developed, or designer plant varieties. It was imperative for all the 140-odd research centres funded by the department to follow the bio-safety guidelines, she added.

Earlier, renowned farm scientist M S Swaminathan released a book titled `Nurturing Biodiversity, an Indian Agenda', authored by Professor Seshagiri Rao, a well-known environmentalist and chairperson of the Science and Technology Advisory Board.

He said the book sought to spell out concerns relating to ecologically-sensitive and equitable development and present alternative models of action for a variety of ecological situations.

Rao and Dr Gadgil criticised the bureaucracy for poor management of India's natural resources, while many people lived at the subsistence level. They said a symbiosis should be sought between sound scientific knowledge, both modern and traditional, and practical ecological wisdom of local communities.

The duo said said they wanted the currentconservation initiatives, which ``were obsessed with the exclusion of people'', to be replaced by a ``supply and safety regime'' consisting of ecologically significant protected areas and sacred elements on the one hand and public land and water to fulfil resource demands on the other.

Praising the West Bengal government's initiative in Joint Forest Management they said it was necessary to conserve a broad spectrum of organisms including minute insects and wild relatives of cultivated plants, especially in the light of the potential applications of genetic resource material, with the help of local communities.

They recommended establishment of village-level committees to regulate access to resource material and decide on equitable sharing. A decentralised approach based on the Panchayati Raj system could be a beginning, Rao added.

They said India should come up with concrete proposals for benefit-sharing at the global level, wherein bio-diversity-rich countries would share their resources andinformation with other countries.

They said India should persuade all countries to include in their patent legislations a specification of geographic origin and prior public knowledge of uses of biological material.

Establishment of a clearing house mechanism for intellectual property rights applications on life forms and creation of biodiversity funds would also be necessary, they argued.