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India launched an array of new high-yielding crop varieties, including herbicide-tolerant rice that can be directly sown into the soil, cutting expenditure on water and farm workers. In India, the world's biggest rice exporter, the conventional method of rice cultivation requires farmers to sow seeds in nurseries and then wait for 20 to 30 days before manually transplanting the seedlings into plantation fields that are ankle-deep in water. With the new seed varieties, developed by the state-run Indian Agricultural Research Institute, farmers only need to irrigate the field once to moisten the soil before sowing the rice.