India is playing an increasingly important role in global discussions on climate action and sustainability, including at the recent G7 Summit held in Canada on June 16–17, 2025. Building resilience in agriculture has been identified as one of the six thematic areas under India’s recently launched BIOE3 policy, which emphasises biotechnology-driven solutions for environmental sustainability, economic growth, and enhanced resilience. This article underscores the pivotal role of genome editing technologies in developing climate-resilient crop varieties, offering sustainable solutions to the challenges posed by climate change.
Agriculture forms the backbone of India’s economy, providing livelihoods to nearly half of its population and contributing significantly to GDP, food security, and rural employment. Despite achieving self-sufficiency in food grain production, Indian agriculture remains highly vulnerable to the growing threats posed by climate change. The increasing frequency of heatwaves, floods, droughts, and unpredictable weather patterns has amplified risks to both productivity and income stability, particularly for small and marginal farmers.
As Indian agriculture remains predominantly smallholder-driven and heavily dependent on the monsoon, it is particularly vulnerable to climate variability. This necessitates the need for innovative solutions like genome editing to develop climate-resilient, high-yielding, and resource-use-efficient crop varieties.
Over the past decades, India has taken significant steps toward building climate-resilient agriculture. The launch of the National Innovations on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in 2011 was a milestone in this direction. Under NICRA, several stress-tolerant varieties resilient to drought, floods, pests, and diseases of rice, maize, mung bean, tomato, and lentil were developed through conventional methods of breeding. These initiatives have helped farmers mitigate some risks associated with climate change.
However, as climate change intensifies, the limitations of conventional breeding approaches become increasingly evident. Conventional breeding cycles are time-consuming, often requiring 8–12 years to develop and release a new variety. The reliance on sexual recombination also carries the risk of linkage drag, where undesirable traits accompany the desirable ones. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, accelerating the development of climate-resilient crop varieties is imperative using the frontier technologies of crop improvement.
According to the Technology and Innovation Report 2025 of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), ‘Frontier technologies – from AI to green hydrogen and gene editing – play a key role in creating and implementing global solutions to address the challenges of the twenty-first century’.
CRISPR-Cas gene editing or genome editing and its advanced derivatives like base editing and prime editing, offer a powerful, precise, and efficient alternative to conventional breeding for crop improvement. Unlike conventional breeding, genome editing allows scientists to make targeted modifications to specific genes, either by knocking out undesirable genes, enhancing the existing ones, or by introducing beneficial alleles without inserting foreign DNA. This precision allows for the rapid and accelerated development of improved crop varieties tailored to withstand climate-induced stresses such as heat, drought, salinity, and flooding. Genome editing also enables fine-tuning of traits related to nitrogen-use efficiency, water-use efficiency, plant architecture, and carbon capture, all critically important for climate resilience. Notably, the CRISPR technology is accessible equally to both large progressive farmers and smallholder farmers.
India is making significant progress with the use of genome editing tools to develop climate-resilient crop varieties that are specifically tolerant to drought and heat stresses, and improving the elite rice cultivars for reducing GHG emissions. Genome editing is also being used to combat issues like soil salinity, which is a growing problem in coastal regions.
India has made remarkable strides in deploying genome editing in rice for climate-resilient agriculture. A breakthrough has been the development of the world’s first genome-edited rice varieties, Pusa DST Rice 1 and DRR Rice 100 (Kamala), derived from mega-varieties MTU 1010 and Samba Mahsuri, respectively. The edited rice varieties, an outcome of the ICAR’s research initiative on genome-editing for developing improved crop varieties, offer a 19% increase in yield and improved tolerance to drought and salinity stresses, along with the specific benefits related to climate resilience, i.e., a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and a saving of 7,500 million cubic meters of irrigation water.
The mega variety MTU 1010 was improved to give rise to the genome-edited version named Pusa DST Rice 1 variety, with a 9.66% to 30.4% increase in yield in saline and alkaline soils. Similarly, Samba Mahsuri (BPT 5204) was edited to develop the improved variety, DRR Rice 100 (Kamala), with an increased number of grains per panicle and 20 days earlier maturity, resulting in saving water and fertilisers, and reducing methane gas emissions.
Encouraged by these achievements, India is now moving ahead with an emphasis on developing genome-edited oilseed and pulse crops. Here, the specific focus is on developing resistance to pests and diseases, improving oil quality, and enhancing overall yield stability under stress in mustard, soybean, chickpea and pigeon pea, as a part of the multi-institutional project supported by NASF-ICAR.
More recently, India has enlarged the scope for deploying genome-editing and strengthened its research efforts for enhancing climate resilience and ensuring sustainable food security in forty field and horticultural crops.
Importantly, the Government of India’s BioE3 Policy, launched in August 2024, recognises climate-resilient agriculture as a key national priority for ensuring food security, sustainability, and economic stability in the face of increasing climate risks. It provides a framework for leveraging biomanufacturing and biotechnology for climate-resilient agriculture. The policy promotes the use of soil microbiomes, bio-based fertilisers, biostimulants, and biopesticides to reduce reliance on chemical inputs, improve soil health, and enhance climate adaptation. It also emphasises carbon capture solutions in agriculture, including soil carbon sequestration and microbial CO₂ conversion, contributing to India’s Net Zero by 2070 target. The BioE3 Policy further integrates digital technologies and AI-driven biofoundries to accelerate crop development and optimise trait selection for climate resilience.
Looking ahead, the prospects for genome editing in Indian agriculture are promising. Public-private partnerships involving India’s vibrant seed industry will further boost the scaling of this technology. Capacity building is equally critical. A new generation of scientists, plant breeders, and technical workforce trained in genome editing, bioinformatics, and AI-driven agriculture will enhance the ongoing efforts.
In conclusion, genome editing represents a revolutionary leap for crop improvement, offering a fast, precise, and effective means of developing climate-resilient, nutritionally enhanced, and sustainable crop varieties. Deploying this technology effectively will prove beneficial for India in ensuring its food security, enhancing farmer incomes, and contributing to global climate goals.
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