India has banned the herbicide paraquat and cancelled all existing registration certificates for the active ingredient, according to a report by Global Agriculture.

The decision removes a chemical that growers across India have used for decades, primarily as a broadcast and inter-row herbicide in plantation crops and no-till systems. Paraquat is a non-selective, fast-acting contact herbicide, and Indian farmers have relied on it heavily in tea gardens, orchards and row-crop situations where rapid burndown of weeds is required at low cost per acre.

The cancellation of existing certificates means current registrants lose their authority to manufacture, sell and distribute paraquat-based formulations in the Indian market. The move effectively ends legal availability of the product for the country's agricultural input channel, from formulators and distributors down to village-level retailers.

Global Agriculture did not detail in the cited report the specific regulatory instrument or the effective timeline for the phase-out, and Indian authorities have not yet published implementation guidance covering existing stocks in the supply chain. How remaining inventory at distributor and retailer level will be handled — recall, sell-through window or disposal — remains an open question for the trade.

For growers, the ban carries direct input-cost implications. Paraquat has historically been one of the cheapest burndown options on a per-hectare basis, and its removal pushes farmers toward alternatives such as glyphosate, glufosinate or grass-specific chemistry, each of which carries a different price point, spectrum of control and resistance profile. Agronomists have long flagged weed-spectrum gaps where paraquat's fast contact action and role in resistance management — particularly against glyphosate-resistant biotypes — will be difficult to replace with a single substitute.

India joins a growing list of jurisdictions that have restricted or banned paraquat, a chemical that has faced scrutiny worldwide over acute toxicity concerns. Registrations in the European Union lapsed years ago, and several producing countries have imposed tight restrictions on sale and use.

The ban also reaches into the supply side of the crop-protection industry. India has been a significant formulator and exporter of generic paraquat products, and manufacturers holding now-cancelled certificates face write-downs of registration assets, formulation capacity and export order books tied to the molecule.

With certificates cancelled rather than simply suspended, the decision appears final for the domestic market. Attention now shifts to how quickly replacement chemistry reaches growers at comparable cost, and whether Indian regulators follow the ban with a defined transition window for existing stocks.