🌿 Environment & EcologyMAINS · GS3.14

Two institutions notified as biodiversity repositories

The National Biodiversity Authority designates a Kochi deep-sea facility and a Pune microbial-and-fungal collection as repositories under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002.

What happened

The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), in consultation with the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, has enabled the notification of two institutions as designated repositories under Section 39 of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002.
The first is the Referral Centre Bhavasagara at the Centre for Marine Living Resources and Ecology (CMLRE), Kochi — a national facility for deep-sea biodiversity.
The second is the MACS Collection of Microorganisms together with the National Fungal Culture Collection of India, both housed at the Agharkar Research Institute (ARI), Pune.
A repository is an institution where biological materials — chiefly voucher specimens and reference cultures — are held in safe custody so that newly discovered species can be authenticated and documented.
Any person who discovers a new taxon must notify the designated repository and deposit voucher specimens with it, creating a verifiable national reference record.
With these two additions, the network of national repositories notified under Section 39 — which stood at 18 institutions — is further strengthened, supporting access and benefit-sharing (ABS).

Background & context

This notification is best read as one moving part inside India's larger biodiversity-governance machinery, which rests on the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. That Act was India's domestic instrument to give effect to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the treaty opened for signature at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, whose three objectives are the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources. The third objective — benefit-sharing — is the reason a repository system exists at all: before benefits from a biological resource can be shared, the resource itself must be reliably identified, named and traced, and that traceability begins with a physically deposited, authenticated specimen.

The 2002 Act created a three-tier institutional architecture. At the national level sits the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), a statutory body established in 2003 with its headquarters at Chennai; it regulates access to India's biological resources by foreign individuals and entities and by Indians for certain commercial and research uses. At the State level are the State Biodiversity Boards (SBBs), and at the local level, every local body is expected to constitute a Biodiversity Management Committee (BMC) tasked with preparing a People's Biodiversity Register (PBR) documenting local biological resources and associated traditional knowledge. The repository mechanism notified here operates at the apex of this structure, serving the whole national documentation effort rather than any single State. The framework was substantially updated by the Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023, which eased compliance for codified traditional knowledge, cultivated medicinal plants and AYUSH practitioners while retaining the core access-and-benefit-sharing architecture.

Section 39 is the specific hook for the present decision. It empowers the Central Government, in consultation with the NBA, to designate institutions as repositories for different categories of biological resources — and it places a legal duty on a person discovering a new taxon to deposit voucher specimens with the designated repository. A voucher specimen is the physical reference object — a preserved organism, tissue, or culture — against which the identity of a species claim can be checked by any future scientist; it is the biological equivalent of a primary source. Without such deposits, taxonomic claims cannot be independently verified, and the chain of custody that ABS depends upon breaks. Today's notification therefore extends, rather than invents, a system: it widens the set of accredited "official memory banks" for India's living diversity into two domains — the deep sea and the microbial-fungal world — that are scientifically demanding and historically under-documented.

For Prelims

Legal provision: Section 39 of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 — empowers the Central Government, in consultation with the NBA, to designate institutions as repositories for different categories of biological resources.
Notifying body: National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) — statutory body under the 2002 Act, established 2003, headquartered at Chennai; administers access regulation and benefit-sharing.
Repository 1 — Referral Centre Bhavasagara: located at the Centre for Marine Living Resources and Ecology (CMLRE), Kochi; a national facility for deep-sea biodiversity; maintains over 3,500 taxonomically identified and geo-referenced voucher specimens. CMLRE operates under the Ministry of Earth Sciences.
Repository 2 — Agharkar Research Institute (ARI), Pune: houses the MACS Collection of Microorganisms (microbial cultures including anaerobic and extremophilic species) and the National Fungal Culture Collection of India (authenticated fungal cultures). ARI is an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology.
The duty it creates: any person discovering a new taxon must notify the designated repository and deposit voucher specimens — a statutory deposit obligation, not a voluntary courtesy.
Network size: 18 institutions had been designated as national repositories under Section 39 before this notification; these two are additions to that set.
Purpose link: the system strengthens documentation of new species and improves the traceability of biological resources, which underpins access and benefit-sharing (ABS).
The parent treaty chain: Biological Diversity Act, 2002 → gives domestic effect to the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992, Rio); the benefit-sharing pillar is further elaborated internationally by the Nagoya Protocol (2010) on access and benefit-sharing, which India has ratified.
Three-tier domestic structure: NBA (national, Chennai) · State Biodiversity Boards (State) · Biodiversity Management Committees preparing People's Biodiversity Registers (local).

What it is NOT: a repository under Section 39 is not a wildlife sanctuary, a national park, or a Biosphere Reserve — those are in-situ conservation areas under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, whereas a repository is an ex-situ reference collection of voucher specimens and cultures. It is also not a Biodiversity Heritage Site (a notified ecologically unique area under the 2002 Act), and the NBA that notifies it is not the same as the National Board for Wildlife or the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. The new-taxon deposit duty here is a documentation obligation, not an access-permit or a patent grant.

For UPSC: Section 39 of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 lets the Centre (with the NBA) designate repositories for biological resources; a new-taxon discoverer must deposit voucher specimens there. The Kochi deep-sea Referral Centre Bhavasagara (3,500+ specimens) and ARI Pune's microbial-plus-fungal collections are the latest additions to a network of 18 such repositories — all feeding the access-and-benefit-sharing (ABS) regime.

Why it matters

The significance of this notification lies in the problem it quietly addresses: India is one of the world's seventeen "megadiverse" countries, holding a very large share of global species on a small fraction of the planet's land area, yet much of that diversity — especially below the waves and at the microbial scale — remains undescribed and undocumented. Access-and-benefit-sharing, the third pillar of the 2002 Act, cannot function on diversity that has never been pinned down. If a pharmaceutical or industrial value is later found in a deep-sea organism or an extremophilic microbe, the country can only claim a fair share of the benefit if it can prove what the resource was and where it came from — and that proof rests on an authenticated voucher specimen held in an accredited repository. By formally extending repository status to a deep-sea facility and to microbial and fungal collections, the decision plugs two of the hardest gaps in India's biodiversity record.

There is also a research-infrastructure dimension. Microbial and fungal cultures — anaerobes, extremophiles, authenticated fungal strains — are working raw material for biotechnology, agriculture and medicine, and a recognised national collection gives scientists a trusted, legally clean source to draw on. The deep-sea referral centre, similarly, anchors India's growing marine-science ambitions, where exploration of the ocean floor and its living resources is an emerging strategic and scientific frontier. In both cases, formal repository status converts a scattered set of specimens into a citable national asset and tightens the documentation discipline that distinguishes a credible biodiversity claim from an unverifiable one.

For Mains

Anchor

A question on India's framework for conserving and equitably using biological resources can be built directly around the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 — its three-tier NBA–SBB–BMC structure and its Section 39 repository mechanism — as the institutional spine of the answer.

Exemplification

The notification of the Kochi deep-sea Referral Centre and ARI Pune's microbial-fungal collections is a concrete, current example of how the State operationalises the access-and-benefit-sharing pillar of the Convention on Biological Diversity through domestic law.

Substantiation

Hard data points — 3,500-plus geo-referenced voucher specimens, a network of 18 national repositories, India's standing as a megadiverse nation — supply verifiable substance for answers on biodiversity governance, conservation, or science-and-technology infrastructure.

Problematisation

The very need to formally accredit deep-sea and microbial repositories exposes the structural gap the answer can foreground: large tracts of India's diversity remain undocumented, weakening both conservation and the country's ability to claim a fair benefit share.

Way-forward

Strengthening voucher-specimen deposit, expanding the repository network into under-covered domains, and tightening traceability are deployable as forward-looking measures to make the ABS regime work in practice rather than only on paper.

Deploys into: conservation and biodiversity governance (GS3.14 — Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, EIA); statutory and regulatory bodies and the institutions established under environmental law (GS2.9); and India's obligations under international environmental conventions such as the CBD and the Nagoya Protocol.

Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · 2026-04-07 · PRID 2249838 · PIB source ↗