Agro-chemical industry body Crop Care Federation of India (CCFI) said it will file a ₹50-crore defamation suit against Greenpeace India for spreading false allegations in its recent report on the Indian tea industry. The Greenpeace report had said it had found pesticide residues in various leading tea brands analysed by it.
“Greenpeace India is continuously refusing to disclose and share essential elements of its ‘findings’, such as the raw data, chromatograms, the protocols followed, the name of the laboratory and scientists who analysed the tea sample allegedly collected from India,” CCFI said in a release.
Rajju Shroff, Chairman, CCFI, and Chairman, UPL (formerly United Phosphorous Ltd.), an agro-chemical major, said, “Greenpeace’s effort to keep essential data away from Indian experts is a clear indication that the report is not just unscientific and fabricated but also done with malicious intent to harm the Indian economy at the behest of its foreign donors.”
The industry body demanded a public apology from Greenpeace as well as withdrawal of the report “if it cannot make public all the raw data concerning this questionable study for scrutiny by Indian experts.”