In April 2019, one of the largest food companies in the world sued 9 potato farmers in Gujarat.
The farmers were growing a potato. They had bought the seed in the local market. Most of them had never heard of intellectual property.
The company wanted damages running into crores.
Her name is Kavitha Kuruganti.
She is a farmers' rights activist and the convenor of an organisation called the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture.
The potato at the centre of it is called FL 2027, sold commercially as FC5. It is the variety grown for Lay's chips, because it has low moisture content and fries well. PepsiCo India had registered it in 2016 under a law called the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act.
That law is unusual, and it is the whole point of this story.
Most countries protect the plant breeder. India's law protects the breeder and the farmer, in the same statute. Section 39 says a farmer is entitled to save, use, sow, resow, exchange, share or sell his farm produce, including the seed of a protected variety.
That right was written in deliberately, because in India seed has been saved and exchanged between farmers for thousands of years, and Parliament decided that a registration certificate should not be able to end that.
PepsiCo sued anyway.
The response was immediate. Farmers' organisations mobilised. Political parties took it up. It became a national argument about whether a company could own a potato.
On 10th May 2019, PepsiCo withdrew all the cases.
That is usually where such a story ends. The company retreats, the news moves on, and the registration that made the lawsuit possible stays exactly where it was.
Kuruganti did not stop there.
In June 2019 she filed an application asking the authority to revoke PepsiCo's registration of the variety altogether. Her argument was that the registration itself was wrong, that documents were missing from the original application, and that granting it was against public interest given the hardship it had caused.
It took 2 years.
On 3rd December 2021, the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Authority revoked the certificate. The order noted that the registration had been granted despite missing paperwork, that there were discrepancies in the process, and that farmers had suffered hardship as a result.
PepsiCo challenged it in the Delhi High Court, and the case has gone back and forth through the courts since.
Whatever the final legal position, one thing already happened and cannot be undone.
9 farmers who could not have afforded to defend themselves were sued by a company worth hundreds of billions, and within a month the company walked away.
Not because the farmers hired better lawyers.
Because 1 woman read the Act properly and knew that Section 39 was in there.
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1September 6, 2026 1.1K 3 14
