The DBT is expected to take a decision on this, at a meeting scheduled for August 10.

This would be the second time, since the present Government came to power, that the company has approached the department under the Ministry of Science and Technology, for permission over controversial imports of germplasm. This, given the notoriety the company has earned over patenting of the ``terminator gene'' that destroys a seed's capacity to regenerate after the first yield. Also, especially in view of the department's own admission that India lacks the wherewithal to screen and regulate germplasm imports for presence of the terminator gene.

Last year too, thecompany was at the centre of a controversy after the DBT authorised the joint venture Monsanto-Mahyco Biotech to conduct open field trials of its genetically engineered BT cotton, in the midst of an admission that it was not in a position to detect the presence of the terminator gene.

In Karnataka, which was one of nine states where over 40 field trials were authorised, the state government and the agriculture minister were kept in the dark. Neither the DBT nor the Union Ministry of Science and Technology was subsequently able to defend the clandestine nature of the trials that were permitted.

Equally not much is known about the precise nature of the tie-up between the premier Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Monsanto, which was to originally have been given land on campus by the former, to set up a hi-tech research laboratory. Even as the MoU was then held to be a classified document, the Monsanto laboratory is now functioning out of a government-owned building just outside the IISccampus.

Meanwhile, the Monsanto research centre, is awaiting the decision from DBT on the application for the import of genetic plasmids. The Centre's Indian Director K P Gopinathan told this correspondent it was a ``routine application'' common to many research laboratories doing work on plasmids. He said the centre had furnished a detailed list of the DNA sequences involved in the import, to DBT, subsequent to their application made in the last week of April. He denied that the imports might have anything to do with the research agreement entered into with the IISc.

The list in any case had earlier been scrutinised by the Centre's own Institutional Bio-Safety Committee (IBSC) as is mandatory under existing law, Gopinathan said. Moreover, among the committee's three external nominees are also included Dr Vaidyalingam Shankar of the Madurai Kamaraj University, a known expert of the BT (Baccilus Thurengiensis) gene and Prof Lakshmi Seetha, a plant biotechnologist from the Indian Institute ofScience.

Prof Gopinathan himself was amongst the earliest scientists to express concern over the absence of a regulatory regimen in place to check germplasm imports for the terminator gene. He had said so in an article published last year in Current Science, a publication of the CV Raman Research Centre. That was when he was still with the IISc and had not taken over as India Director of Monsanto's Research Centre.