All of us are aware of the role of dwarf varieties in "green revolution". This trait was introduced into the wheat varieties by plant breeders. Despite the lack of exact knowledge about the gene. the painstaking work of scientists has paid rich dividends. Recently, the nature of the dwarfing allele has been defined by combining the knowledge of genomics and transgenics and its product has been shown to be involved in the action of a plant growth hormone, gibberellin. Introduction of a gene representing a mutant allele into rice results in dwarf phenotype indicating that it would be possible to do precision breeding of crop plants by making use of the gene and transgenic technology, which allows introduction of a foreign gene into a crop plant without barriers of incompatibility.

The need for improvement of quality and quantity of agricultural products is obvious keeping in view the expected world population of 8 billions by the year 2020 and increasing desire of human beings for variety and better quality. While in some parts of the world, rapid developments require more food of better quality, in others more agricultural production is a necessity to sustain the development and economy. With limited natural resources available to improve agricultural production, genetically engineered crops are being looked upon as a promising alternative which can benefit farmers, manufacturers as well as consumers. While the farmers may benefit from reduced use of pesticides/herbicides, sustainability in natural harshness and better yield, the manufacturers may benefit by obtaining more suitable material for quality production or by producing speciality/pharmaceutical products by employing plants as biofactories. The consumer benefits by the availability of desired level of food which is more nutritious and tastes better. As agriculture becomes a means of creating wealth and more jobs. nation is the ultimate beneficiary. With the increasing interest in genetically modified organisms, the global market for transgenic crop products is estimated to reach US$ 25 billion in the year 2010

Last few years have witnessed remarkable progress in the production and cultivation of transgenic crops. Major transgenic crops are soybean, maize, cotton, canola, potato, squash and papaya and significant improvements include herbicide, insect and virus resistance or product quality. Work needs to be strengthened particularly on 
cereals and legumes which are considered pillars of our food security. Since several thousand field trials of transgenic crops have already been approved worldwide and quite a few more useful genes have been deployed, the repertoire of traits is likely to increase impressively. Despite the fact that a transgenic crop lakes about a decade to reach the consumer, the potential of transgenic crops in providing improved production and food security has led to their cultivation on about 40 million hectares of land in the year 1999 world-over, including countries like USA, Argentina, Canada, China, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, Spain and France. This is a big leap forward accounting for twenty three-fold increase in four years keeping in view the global area of transgenic crops in the years 1998. 1997. 1996 being only 27.8, 11 and 1.7 million hectare, respectively. India hasacquired and developed a variety of transgenics which are at various stages of evaluation and approval.

Recent success stories of transgenic crops include generation of "golden rice" by engineering pathway for provitamin A biosynthesis, and iron-rich rice. Such rice is expected to provide for vitamin A and iron deficiency in millions of under-nourished children and women throughout the world. Similarly, plants are being used to produce vaccines and therapeutic agents like insulin, antibodies and drug biomolecules. Production of plastics and novel Fibre for cloths is also expected to emerge from transgenic crops. Thus, the progress in plant biotechnology is bound to influence modern agriculture and community health.

Quite often concerns have been expressed about adverse impact of transgenic crops on health, society and environment. In view of these, each case of genetically engineered plants has to be considered on its merit. Thus, clonally propagated crops or genes transferred from wild-relatives or those providing nutritional or yield improvement and others providing resistance against drought or salinity are likely to do least harm to the environment. Several others like insect or herbicide resistance need to be assessed scientifically and may require a management practice to begin with. Also, their deployment is to be considered in concert with reduction in application of chemical protectants. Still others like terminator technology, unless proved otherwise, should not be allowed to risk interests of innocent/ignorant farmers and better he restricted to containment areas. At the same time. message should be clear that placing all transgenics against environment and health runs the risk of depriving millions of the people food and better nutrition which the new technology has a potential to provide for.

Another powerful tool that has emerged to help breeders to improve the crops is marker based selection. Once a DNA marker for any trait has been identified, it can help trace the mobility of trait in progeny without getting affected by environmental conditions and several traits/loci can be considered together. The ultimate in marker selection can be achieved from the knowledge about the entire genome sequence of an organism. Such knowledge in combination with computer-based annotation of DNA sequence provides the basis for investigating function of genes and relevance of variability. Among the crop plants, the initiative on rice with a genome size of 430 Mb is being taken by an "International Rice Genome Sequencing Program" involving ten countries. Already. 6000 markers have been used to prepare a physical map of rice chromosomes and over 15000 non-redundant ESTs (expressed sequence tags) have been reported. India has recently committed to sequence 10 Mb of chromosome 11 office as apart of the international effort which will also help develop capacity to absorb and utilize a large amount of data becoming available world-over from genome leased programs. The next step involves deciphering of the function of such genes through analysis of their expression pattern by micro-array chip technology, which allows an assessment of expression of entire genome of an organism in space, time and environment. Further, gene "knock-outs" and "gene tags" are being produced to define function of genes (about 1,50,000 are already available in Arabidopsis) by way of transgenic technology which can help uncover genes related to disease and enviornmental stress and DNA elements to target engineering of useful genes. Isolation of receptor kinase genes for disease resistance and a gene for Vitamin E biosynthesis are examples of the force office combined technologies, transgenics and genomics. This will significantly improve our capacity to develop plants with a potential for more and better food. In India, concerted efforts of several laboratories and generous support of the Department of Biotechnology and Indian Council of Agricultural Research along with the inputs from the Rockefeller Foundation are beginning to pay dividends and pave way for future progress towards sustainable agriculture. The day is not far away when models and code of conduct for industry-academia interaction will evolve to reap tile benefits of biotechnological revolution, not only for the people in India, but for mankind as a whole!