Institute of Pesticide Formulation Technology (IPFT) Gurgaon, an Institute devoted to the development of user and environment friendly new generation pesticide formulation technologies, recently organised an industry seminar on “Formulations development and regulatory aspects for generation of pesticide registration data”.

“The main objective of this interaction meet is to enlighten the agrochemical community about the dynamics of regulatory guidelines. Regulations are changing and when regulations change, the testing pattern and the development of the foundations for pesticides and any other products also change. The idea is to bring clarity in filing the regulated documents as well as to make industry understand about how to comply with the change in regulations with respect to the testing and for product quality and all. Hence, we have called multi-disciplinary teams like academician, researchers and regulators to talk about these,” Dr Mohana Krishna Reddy Mudiam, Director, IPFT, said.

Mudiam further said it’s a Government of India initiative to build the interaction/network with industry to address the multiple problems of Industry in single platform in pesticide process technology, formulation, transport, and remediation to meet the goals of Viksit Bharat and protect human health and environment.

IPFT is an autonomous Institution under the Department of Chemicals & Petrochemicals, Ministry of Chemicals & Fertilizers, Government of India.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Meet, Mudiam, said: The latest trend is the combination formulations in which we need to incorporate more than two pesticides in a single formulation to reduce the cost of the formulation. Today, we are not facing that only one pest is attacking on the plant. Today, multiple pest have been attacking on the plant. ZW and ZC formulations have been there. Now, Nano encapsulated combination formulations and combining the biobotanical pesticides with the synthetic paste is set to reduce the dose of the synthetic paste.”

IPFT is now focusing to the alternative to synthetic paste sets and also to reduce the dose of the synthetic pesticides by combining or synergizing with the biobotanical pesticides. “We are focusing with different plant products like Neem, Shisham, Kikar and others,” Mudiam said.

IPFT is also exploring the waste from wealth like cashew nut cell and cooking oil. “We are now also going to collaborate with some laboratories to produce formulations from the waste of the biomass generated because biomass generation is a big problem,” he said adding that IPFT is going to collect the biomass and convert it to a product in order to minimize the biomass as well as utilize it for the benefit of the farmers,” Mudiam informed.

Dr. Jitendra Kumar, Assistant Director General (NASF), ICAR and Ex Director, IPFT was the Chief Guest on the occasion. Kumar welcomed the effort of IPFT in pesticide chemistry for offering single platform solutions in technology, testing and formulations. He highlighted the need of collaboration between Iindustry with Research Organizations. He emphasized on the technology transfer from IPFT to various agrochemical industries and urged them to come forward and invest on the technologies available at IPFT for its commercialization.

The day-long seminar was addressed by experts such as Dr.  Ekta Kapoor, Head, National GLP Compliance Monitoring Authority, Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India; Dr. Subhash Chand, Joint Director (Chem), Central Insecticide Laboratory, Directorate of Plant Protection Quarantine & Storage; Dr Sanjay Kumar, Former Plant Protection Officer (PP), Directorate of Plant Protection Quarantine & Storage and Dr. Amrish Agrawal, Dr. Samsul Alam, Dr Deepak Jaiswal and Dr. Smriti Kala (all from IPFT).

The representatives from various agrochemical industries, CROs and professionals from academics/research attended the event.