Environmental and biological stresses are major challenges confronted by plants as they are a source of living for a large number of insect pests, some of them being devastating. Helping the plants fight and mitigate these insect attacks is an important aspect of crop improvement programmes. Pigeonpea is one of the important pulse crops of India and is infested with a plethora of insect pests. Most devastating are the pod borers, Helicoverpa armigera and Maruca vitrata. Lack of availability of germplasm for resistance to Helicoverpa in pigeonpea has resulted in the promotion of biotechnological approaches for insect resistance. Advancement in plant tissue culture, transformation and molecular biology have greatly benefited crop improvement programs and genes for insect resistance can now be moved into plants more quickly. Since the time plant research in this area has gained momentum, innumerable genes and strategies have been identified and used for the development of pest resistant crops. There have been many potent genes ranging from the Bt ICPs to Bt vip and other genes to mitigate insect pests. Some of the genes have changed the entire pest management scenario and have effectively demonstrated the success of the technology and the identified genes. However, economically important crops like pigeonpea are less amenable to tissue culture and hence require the development of non-conventional methodologies for genetic engineering. At NIPB, we have developed transgenics in pigeonpea harbouring cry1AcF and cry2Aa by following a non-conventional in planta transformation protocol. The transgenics were evaluated for T-DNA integration, expression and efficacy against pod borer. Superior transgenics with high cry expression and increased insect mortality were evaluated in advanced generations. We have now obtained regulatory clearances for the evaluation of selected pigoenpea transgenics with the two genes for pod borer resistance under confined field conditions. The entire journey of development, analysis and regulatory road map of pigeon transgenics will be presented.