Rethinking Pest Control: The Problem ATGC Is Solving

ATGC Biotech Pvt. Ltd., founded in 2011 by Dr. Markandeya Gorantla, Dr. Vijaya Bhasker Reddy Lachagari and their founding team, is headquartered in Genome Valley, Hyderabad. The company is India’s only commercial-scale manufacturer of pheromone biosimilars. Its core premise is that Indian farmers need affordable, indigenous and field-adapted alternatives to conventional chemical pesticides and imported pheromone technologies.

Conventional spraying is particularly ineffective against pests that live inside fruits, stems, shoots and bolls, including pink bollworm, fruit flies and brinjal fruit and shoot borer. This can lead farmers to increase the frequency and intensity of pesticide applications, raising production costs, exposure risks and chemical residues.

ATGC seeks to address this problem by reducing pesticide dependence while supporting safer food production, export compliance and India’s domestic bio-manufacturing capabilities.

“Insect Family Planning”: The Technology

ATGC’s approach shifts pest management from killing insects to disrupting their behaviour and reproduction, which the company calls “Insect Family Planning.” Its technology uses pheromone biosimilars and other semiochemicals—chemical signals that insects naturally use to find mates, food and suitable sites for reproduction.

Its flagship CREMIT™ (Controlled Release Enhanced Mating Interruption Technology) is a patented slow-release system that maintains pheromone concentrations in the field. By saturating an area with synthetic pheromone, it disrupts male insects’ ability to locate females, reducing successful mating and therefore subsequent pest generations.

The company’s “No Pump, No Spray, No Water” approach allows deployment through dispensers, tablets, dollops and drone-compatible formats. ATGC is also developing technologies including AI-enabled biosensors, biochips, RNAi and synthetic-biology-enabled production, expanding its focus beyond pheromones into agricultural biotechnology more broadly.

Disrupting the Pest Life Cycle: How It Works

ATGC’s products manipulate insect behaviour in different ways. Pheromone lures attract pests into traps for monitoring or removal, while mating-disruption formulations prevent males from locating females. Attract-and-kill systems concentrate pests at treated points, and anti-aggregation or repellent signals discourage pests from settling or reproducing.

A major advantage is that these technologies can target specific pest species without broadly affecting the surrounding environment. However, mating disruption is most effective when implemented across clusters of farms rather than isolated plots, allowing pest populations to be suppressed at the landscape level.

The approach therefore addresses multiple challenges simultaneously: pests that are difficult to reach through spraying, pesticide resistance caused by repeated chemical use, residue concerns affecting agricultural exports, and dependence on petrochemical-derived crop-protection inputs.

From Innovation to Adoption: Bottlenecks to Scale

Commercialising pheromone technology presents significant technical and institutional challenges. Formulations must remain stable and release pheromones at the appropriate rate across India’s varied climatic conditions. Products also require crop- and pest-specific validation while remaining affordable for smallholders.

Area-wide deployment creates an additional coordination challenge. Unlike conventional pesticides, which farmers can apply independently to individual plots, mating disruption requires sufficient coverage across a wider geographical area. This makes farmer coordination and institutional support important for successful adoption.

Scaling also requires investment in manufacturing, quality control, raw-material supply chains, stability testing and regulatory approvals. International expansion adds further requirements, including country-specific registrations and efficacy and climate-stability data.

There is also a behavioural challenge: conventional pesticides provide farmers with an immediate and visible “kill” effect, whereas pheromone technologies work through less visible behavioural and reproductive disruption.

From Field Deployment to Global Reach: Measuring Impact

ATGC’s technologies are being used across crops including cotton, mango, guava, custard apple, dragon fruit, gourds, melons, oil palm, tomato and brinjal.

Its CREMIT PBW / Akarsh ME technology has reportedly been deployed across more than 200,000 acres of cotton and horticultural crops. ATGC reports 26 patents and patent filings, 12 scientific publications and more than 50 commercial-stage products, with nearly 90 products in its broader development pipeline.

Internationally, the World Economic Forum highlighted ATGC in 2024 as a case study in scaling pheromone technology for row crops such as rice and cotton. The company is also reported to be the only non-US supplier to the USDA’s “Slow the Spread” programme, with molecules undergoing registration across more than twenty countries.

ATGC reports a domestic reach of more than 100,000 acres and over 30,000 farmers across eleven states, alongside fourteen institutional partners.

Why It Matters for India

ATGC’s model intersects with several national priorities: reducing farmer exposure to pesticides, lowering chemical residues, protecting agricultural exports and strengthening India’s domestic biotechnology and bio-manufacturing capabilities.

Pheromone-based crop protection can also reduce dependence on petrochemical-derived inputs, supporting the transition toward more resource-efficient and lower-carbon agricultural systems. This makes the technology relevant not only to pest management but also to food safety, export competitiveness, rural livelihoods and India’s broader bioeconomy ambitions.

ATGC has advocated for a National Mission on Fossil-Fuel-Free Crop Protection and Area-Wide Pheromone Adoption, focusing on priority export crops, invasive and internal-feeding pests and landscape-level deployment.

Building an Enabling Ecosystem

ATGC’s technologies have been referenced in ICAR and state agricultural university packages of practice. The company has also submitted a white paper on pheromone-based crop protection to the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser and the Prime Minister’s Office.

In 2025, ATGC received the Innovation Leadership Award at the 16th Agriculture Leadership Conclave. Continued scale-up will depend on stronger collaboration among state agriculture departments, ICAR, BIRAC and innovation ecosystems such as the BeST Cluster, particularly around field validation, manufacturing, farmer adoption and international regulatory approvals.

ATGC demonstrates that agricultural biotechnology can move beyond simply replacing one pesticide with another. By disrupting pest reproduction and behaviour, its model offers a potential shift from repeated chemical intervention toward preventive, species-specific and area-wide pest management. The central policy challenge is now to create the coordination, financing and regulatory systems needed to make such technologies accessible at the scale required by India’s predominantly smallholder agricultural sector.