Parthenium Hysterophorus or better know as the Congress grass is the deadliest weed that we have in India thanks to the government’s decision to import an innocuous variety of wheat, PL-480 from the US in the 1950s and this weed came with it – in fact, the deadly weed is named “Congress” grass because it was imported into the country by the then Congress government in centre. Parthenium is known to be a deadly weed for both humans and animals alike apart from being dangerous for the flora of the region including for the crops. One plant of Parthenium can produce around 25-30,000 seeds that can propagate rapidly with wind and if it comes in contact with humans, it can cause severe skin and respiratory allergies such as eczema and asthma. When the weed was first sighted in Pune in 1956, it was dismissed as insignificant incident – within five years, the Congress grass became a major threat in Dharwar, Bombay-Karnataka region and two years later another report came that it had travelled far north as Jammu and then, as they say, the rest is history – it spread rapidly across the country and it is estimated that in the last 50 years, over 350 lakh hectares of land in the country (or over 10% or our land area) including 20 lakh hectares of arable land has been infested by this deadly weed. The cumulative loss on account of this weed till date with its impact on humans, animals as well as crops so far has been estimated at a whopping Rs 160,516 crores!
The fight against the Congress grass is gaining momentum in India with the induction of a beetle from Mexico, Zygogramma bicolorata – it has shown some encouraging results and hopefully, if successful, this beetle can finish off the weed and we can hope that the beetle itself is harmless – at least that’s what is being touted about it right now! We’ll know for sure in 50 years time! Hopefully, then, someone will write about it and we’ll all be able to breathe easy if the writer acknowledges this act of releasing the beetle to fight the weed as the timely step taken by India to eradicate Parthenium Hysterophorus and not a step that brought another monster Zygogramma bicolorata!
However, on an ironical note, it is interesting to notice that the other scourge that India is facing today, that is that of corruption has been incubated, bred, re-bred, mutated, cloned and then released into various facets of life in a day of India by the same grand old party of India, the Congress, who also got the infamous weed into this country. Further, if a weed named Congress can cause over Rs 160,000 crores of loss in over 50 years, then, imagine what the real one has done so far and can potentially do going forward! Another practically unknown fact (and not surprisingly so) is that Mahatma Gandhi wanted to dismantle the Congress party (as it existed then) 60 years back as a first step after our independence as he feared exactly what actually happened in India later after him – he was a visionary and could see that the Congress party, if it stayed in power, would hijack democracy in India (by leveraging on the fact that they were the main party that got us independence and by appropriating the legacy of leaders of the freedom struggle like Gandhi as theirs) and would lead the country on a path of pseudo-democracy with a single party rule which is what actually happened for the good part of our independent history. Had Gandhi succeeded in his plan to dismantle the Congress party, then, for all we know we would not have been as badly ravaged by all the three scourges (Congress party, Congress grass and Corruption) for over 50 years or at the very least we would not have a weed named Congress grass for sure!
I firmly believe all is not lost yet and we can still make Gandhi’s dream a reality and hopefully rest of the results would follow!
