Integrated pest and disease management

Story hook

In the cotton belt of Yavatmal district, Maharashtra, the monsoon of 2017 turned lethal — not from floods, but from a fine mist. Between July and October 2017, at least 21 farmers and farm labourers died and over 800 were hospitalised with breathlessness, vomiting and blurred vision. The cause: acute poisoning while spraying monocrotophos and other organophosphate insecticides on tall, dense Bt cotton to fight a pink bollworm outbreak. Many sprayed without masks, in the wind, with leaky knapsack sprayers, mixing cocktails of chemicals on the advice of local dealers — not agronomists. The Maharashtra government ordered an SIT; monocrotophos was already banned for vegetables and restricted elsewhere, yet freely available.

Three years later, a very different threat arrived from the west. In 2020, the worst desert locust invasion in 27 years crossed from East Africa and Pakistan into Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Swarms a square kilometre wide — each holding up to 80 million insects, each eating its own body weight daily — could strip a field bare in hours. India's Locust Warning Organisation (LWO), set up in 1939, scrambled drones, fire-tender sprayers and tractor-mounted units in a months-long campaign.

These two crises bracket the central question of this topic: how does a country with relatively low average pesticide use (about 0.6 kg/ha) still suffer poisoning deaths, residue scares and devastating outbreaks? The answer lies in uneven, unscientific, dealer-driven chemical use — and in the slow, underfunded spread of Integrated Pest Management (IPM), the science of using chemicals last, not first.

Why this matters for UPSC

GS-III ("agriculture", "issues of buffer stocks and food security", "economics of animal-rearing") and GS-III environment routinely test pesticide policy, IPM, biological control and pest outbreaks. Prelims has tested pheromone traps, Trichogramma, the locust, fall armyworm, and the institutions (KVK, ATMA, ICAR). Mains asks about extension-service effectiveness, farmer-adoption barriers and the economics of chemical vs ecological pest control. Interview boards probe whether you can connect low average use with concentrated misuse, and link pest shifts to climate change. It also intersects with health (pesticide residues, FSSAI MRLs), trade (export rejections over residues) and Sustainable Development Goals.