Agricultural inputs are fundamental to India’s agricultural productivity. Ensuring that farmers receive genuine pesticides and seeds has therefore become an important regulatory priority. When counterfeit products enter the market, the consequences extend far beyond individual crop losses. CropLife International estimates that up to 30 percent of pesticides sold in India are counterfeit or spurious, eroding investment in research and development (R&D), degrading soil health, increasing agricultural non-performing assets (NPAs), and weakening rural demand across sectors such as automobiles and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG).
Recent enforcement actions illustrate the scale of the challenge. In March 2026, authorities uncovered fake pesticide operations in Rajkot and Dumka, Jharkhand. Earlier, in August 2025, the Central Government ordered a nationwide crackdown after farmers in Madhya Pradesh suffered extensive soybean crop losses linked to spurious weedicides. These incidents underscore a broader policy challenge. While enforcement remains necessary, it intervenes only after the damage has been done. Preventing counterfeit products from entering the supply chain requires regulatory systems that can both trace products and verify that they are genuine.
India’s Regulatory Response
India’s recent response has centred on strengthening digital traceability across agricultural supply chains. Two initiatives – the Insecticides (First Amendment) Rules, 2025 and the draft Seeds Bill, 2025 – seek to improve regulatory oversight through QR-code-based identification and stronger enforcement provisions. These reforms represent important progress. The question, however, is whether improved traceability alone is sufficient to prevent counterfeit products from reaching farmers.
The Insecticides (First Amendment) Rules, 2025, notified on 3 June 2025, require pesticide manufacturers to affix QR codes containing the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), batch number, manufacturing date and expiry date. The amendment makes information already present on product labels easier to access and verify through a digital interface. However, a standard static QR code can itself be copied and reproduced on counterfeit packaging. A farmer scanning such a code may retrieve the correct details of a legitimate product while unknowingly purchasing a counterfeit version.
The draft Seeds Bill, 2025 adopts a similar approach by proposing a Centralised Seed Traceability Portal to generate QR codes for every seed package while introducing stronger penalties for distributing spurious seeds. This significantly improves visibility across the seed supply chain but faces the same limitation. If counterfeit products carry duplicated QR codes, the system can authenticate the information associated with the code without authenticating the product itself.
Traceability Is Not Authentication
This distinction lies at the heart of an effective anti-counterfeiting framework. Every such system performs two related but distinct functions: tracking products through the supply chain and verifying that the product presented to a buyer is genuine.
Traceability answers the question, Where has this product come from? Authentication answers a different question: Is this product genuine?
The difference has important implications for regulatory design. A product may be fully traceable through the supply chain while still being counterfeit if its identifying features can be copied and reproduced. By relying primarily on standard QR codes, India’s emerging framework substantially strengthens traceability but provides only limited assurance of authenticity at the point of sale. Closing this gap would make the regulatory architecture considerably more effective in protecting farmers from counterfeit agricultural inputs.
Strengthening the Regulatory Framework
The existing reforms provide a strong foundation. The next step is to complement traceability with authentication measures that allow farmers and regulators to verify product authenticity at the point of sale. Once constituted, the proposed Central Pesticides Board and Central Seed Committee should consider two targeted reforms.
First, the regulatory framework should require packaging identifiers that cannot be reproduced without detection. The objective is not to prescribe a single technology but to establish minimum authentication standards that manufacturers must satisfy. Existing solutions already achieve this in different ways. Some embed copy-detection patterns within packaging that reveal when labels have been duplicated, while others combine publicly visible traceability codes with concealed, single-use verification tokens linked to a secure back-end database. Both approaches make successful counterfeiting substantially more difficult than simply reproducing a printed QR code.
Second, future amendments to both the pesticide rules and the Seeds Bill should make robust authentication features a mandatory condition for product registration and manufacturing licence renewal. Farmers are currently expected to distinguish genuine products from counterfeit ones with little independent means of verification. Placing greater responsibility on manufacturers to ensure product integrity throughout the supply chain would shift the burden of authenticity from farmers to those best positioned to guarantee it.
Digital traceability represents an important advance in regulating agricultural inputs, but traceability alone cannot eliminate counterfeiting. An effective regulatory framework must also enable reliable product authentication. Unless both functions operate together, farmers will continue to bear the risk of purchasing counterfeit products that appear genuine, despite complying with every prescribed verification step.