One in three farmers has bought a fake agri-input in the last year. The counterfeiter’s margin is 30–35%. The farmer’s loss is his whole season. It is time we called this what it is — organised theft from the countryside.
By Raghupati Singh , Executive Chairman ,Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI)
Somewhere in the plains of Bihar this season, a smallholder will walk into his local agri-input shop, hand over money he could not easily spare, and walk out with a plain white bottle. Minimal label. No batch details. No precautions printed on the side. He will spray it on his standing crop trusting that it will protect his yield — the yield that pays for his children’s fees, his loan instalment, his year.
He has, in all likelihood, just been robbed. He simply does not know it yet, and by the time the pests survive and the soil suffers, the man who sold him the bottle will be long gone.
This is the invisible economy of the fake — and a new independent assessment makes it impossible to keep looking away. The State of Counterfeiting in India 2025, conducted by CRISIL Intelligence on behalf of the Authentication Solution Providers’ Association (ASPA), turns a spotlight on a menace rural India has lived with in silence for decades. For the first time, we have numbers that match what every farm leader has long known in his bones.
The scale of the theft
The findings from the agro-products chapter of the report should shame us into action.
More than one in three farmers reported encountering a counterfeit agri-input at least once in the past twelve months. Among those who did, 75% said the fake purchase happened at their local agri-input retailer — the very shop they are supposed to trust — and 18% came through informal supply chains. Farmers themselves estimate that as much as 30% of agro-input products in the market may be counterfeit, and a striking 82% believe the problem has grown worse over the past year alone.
These are not the impressions of distant analysts. They are the lived perceptions of the men and women who feed this nation.
Wider industry estimates only sharpen the picture. A long-cited FICCI–TSMG study pegged non-genuine and illegal pesticides at roughly a quarter of the domestic agrochemical market by value and nearly a third by volume. Set against an Indian pesticide and fertiliser industry valued at around ₹1.8 trillion in FY26, the arithmetic of the loss is staggering — a leakage measured not in crores but in tens of thousands of crores, drained straight out of the rural economy.
And the trend line points the wrong way. ASPA’s own repository recorded 276 media-reported instances of fake agrochemicals between 2018 and 2025, with incidents rising roughly two-and-a-half times over the period. Tellingly, fertilisers alone accounted for about 40% of these cases — a reminder that the counterfeiter follows demand, and demand for fertiliser is universal.
Three faces of the fake
The counterfeiter is not a single villain but a whole ecosystem, and the report usefully separates the threat into three forms.
The crudest is the outright fake pesticide — talc, diluted chemicals, or banned and untested substances passed off in those anonymous white bottles. These either fail to kill the pest, or kill it while leaving toxic by-products that poison the soil for seasons to come.
More insidious is the sophisticated counterfeit of a genuine brand — high-quality labels, convincing packaging, even a copy of the real active ingredient, but adulterated with impurities that gut its effectiveness. Here the deception is so complete that even careful farmers are fooled. In a detail that captures the sheer cynicism of the trade, counterfeiters have been found buying up genuine empty bottles from farmers for as much as a quarter of the printed price, refilling them with substandard muck, and reselling them as the real thing.
The third is the illegal parallel import — legitimate goods swapped for illegal generic copies, repackaged, and floated back into the supply chain.
Different methods, one victim: the farmer.
The economics of a rigged game
Why does this trade flourish? Because it is designed to. The report is blunt about the incentive structure. Counterfeit agro-products are perceived to be around 24% cheaper than the genuine article — an irresistible saving for a farmer squeezed by input costs. The margin for the distributor or retailer who pushes the fake runs to a fat 30–35%. And the counterfeiter exploits precisely the moment of the farmer’s greatest vulnerability — peak sowing and spraying season, when genuine stock runs short and desperation runs high.
It is a market failure engineered on the backs of the powerless. The farmer saves a few rupees at the counter and pays for it with a 3–4% loss in yield, pest resistance that compounds over years, and degraded soil that no discount can restore. The counterfeiter pockets the difference. This is not petty crime. It is a transfer of wealth from the poorest producer to the most predatory intermediary — and it deserves to be named as organised economic crime against rural India.
A regulatory vacuum we can no longer defend
Here lies the uncomfortable truth. The report notes what many of us have argued for years: India does not yet have adequate legislation to prosecute this menace effectively. Enforcement is fractured between state and central authorities, breeding weak coordination and delayed action, while the counterfeiter — mobile, cash-rich, and unbothered by borders — moves faster than any of them. The survey found that nearly half of counterfeit agrochemicals are sourced from outside the state in which they are sold, making a mockery of any purely local crackdown.
The primary statute governing pesticides, the Insecticides Act of 1968, is a relic of another India. Its long-promised successor, the Pesticide Management Bill — in circulation since 2008 and formally drafted in 2020 — remains stuck in limbo. It proposes a Central Pesticides Board, licensing discipline for manufacturers and retailers, and the power to ban hazardous molecules. Whatever the legitimate debates over its finer clauses, a Bill that has waited a decade and a half while fakes multiplied is a Bill the countryside can no longer afford to keep waiting for.
The states worst hit tell their own story — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Haryana, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. It is no coincidence that this map overlaps so heavily with our agrarian heartland and our most vulnerable smallholders.
The way forward: awareness, authentication, and cooperation
None of this is cause for despair. The same report that measures the disease also points to the cure — and here rural India can lead.
First, arm the farmer with knowledge. The survey found that 58% of farmers believe they can spot a fake, yet most rely only on packaging and labelling — the very things counterfeiters replicate best. Barely a quarter check genuine authentication features like holograms or traceability codes. Encouragingly, farmers say they are willing to pay a 14% premium for a guaranteed genuine product. That willingness is a mandate: educate farmers to demand track-and-trace, QR verification, and tamper-evident seals, and the market will reward the honest supplier.
Second, harden the supply chain with technology. Security holograms, tamper-evident films, low-cost transponder tags and traceability codes — integrated with track-and-trace systems — give both the farmer and the enforcement officer a way to separate the genuine from the fake at the point of sale. The tools exist. What is missing is scale and awareness.
Third — and this is where our conviction lies — route inputs through cooperative and last-mile institutions we can trust. PACS, FPOs and cooperative distribution channels are not merely delivery mechanisms; they are accountability mechanisms. When a farmer’s inputs come through a cooperative he part-owns rather than an anonymous retailer chasing a 35% margin, the incentive to defraud collapses. The Sahkar Se Samriddhi vision — cooperation as the riverbed carrying inputs, credit and trust to the last village — is also, quietly, one of the most powerful anti-counterfeiting instruments we possess.
And where states have shown political will, the difference is visible. Recent crackdowns on spurious agri-inputs — in Rajasthan and elsewhere — prove that determined enforcement, a dedicated multi-disciplinary task force, and the courage to act are not beyond us.
A question of dignity
Ultimately, the counterfeit agri-input is not just an economic problem or a regulatory gap. It is an assault on the dignity of the Indian farmer — the assumption that he is too poor, too rushed, or too unaware to notice he is being cheated.
The CRISIL–ASPA report has given us the evidence. Our farmers have given us their trust. What remains is for policymakers, industry, cooperatives and civil society to give them the one thing the counterfeiter has stolen for far too long: the certainty that when they buy protection for their crop, it is real.
The white bottle in the field should be the last thing our farmer ever has to fear. Let us make it so.
