NBA revamps benefit-sharing fund rules

At its 77th meeting, the National Biodiversity Authority rationalised how Access and Benefit Sharing money is split between communities and institutions under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002.

What happened

• The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), at its 77th meeting on 23 March 2026 in Chennai, cleared a policy drive to streamline the use of Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) funds collected under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002.
• It fixed clear percentage shares for how ABS money is routed — between the institutions/repositories that hold biological material and the local communities that conserve the underlying resource.
• The Authority tied fund flows to two pivots in the Act: Section 27 (the National Biodiversity Fund and channelling benefits to claimants/beneficiaries) and Section 32 (use of funds where the benefit claimants cannot be identified).
• It also approved revised guidelines for designated repositories — covering safe custody of voucher specimens, provenance records, standard operating procedures, digitisation, and curbs on the physical transfer of biological materials.
• The thrust is administrative rather than legislative: no change to the parent Act, but a tighter, rule-bound formula so that ABS collections actually reach conservation and the communities at source.

Background & context

India is one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries and a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), adopted at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The CBD rests on three objectives: conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising out of the use of genetic resources. That third objective — "access and benefit sharing" — was given operational teeth globally by the Nagoya Protocol on ABS (2010, in force 2014), a supplementary agreement to the CBD.

India enacted the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 to give domestic effect to the CBD, and the corresponding Biological Diversity Rules, 2004 followed. The Act builds a three-tier institutional architecture: the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) at the apex (established in 2003, a statutory and autonomous body headquartered in Chennai under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change); State Biodiversity Boards (SBBs) at the state level; and Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs) at the level of local bodies — panchayats and municipalities — which also prepare People's Biodiversity Registers documenting local resources and traditional knowledge. For Union Territories, the corresponding state-level role is played by UT Biodiversity Councils (UTBCs).

The core regulatory idea is that a foreign person or company, or an Indian entity with foreign participation, must obtain the NBA's prior approval before accessing India's biological resources or associated traditional knowledge for research, commercial use, bio-survey or bio-utilisation, or before applying for intellectual property rights based on them. When the NBA grants such approval, it imposes benefit-sharing conditions — a monetary or non-monetary return to the country and to the communities who are the custodians of the resource. The money so realised is the "ABS fund" this policy drive is about. The Act was amended by the Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023, which eased compliance for AYUSH practitioners, cultivators and codified-traditional-knowledge users, and decriminalised offences (shifting them to penalties adjudicated administratively) — context that frames why operational clarity on fund use has become a priority.

For Prelims

• What NBA is: the National Biodiversity Authority — a statutory, autonomous body created under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, established in 2003, headquartered at Chennai, functioning under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC).
• Three-tier structure: NBA (national) → State Biodiversity Boards / UT Biodiversity Councils (state/UT) → Biodiversity Management Committees (local bodies). BMCs maintain People's Biodiversity Registers.
• What ABS means: Access and Benefit Sharing — the mechanism by which benefits from the commercial or research use of biological resources and associated traditional knowledge are returned to the country and to source communities.
• The new fund-sharing formula — identifiable source: 25–40% to the institutions/repositories, and 60–75% to the communities, routed through SBBs and UTBCs.
• Where information on the source is inadequate: 30% to institutions and 70% to the NBA (then onward to SBBs/UTBCs), in line with Section 32 of the Act.
• For traders/intermediaries with untraceable origin: funds are utilised under Section 27.
• Key sections: Section 27 — National/Local Biodiversity Fund and channelling of benefits to claimants; Section 32 — use of funds where benefit claimants are not identifiable, for socio-economic development of the source areas.
• Repository guidelines: safe custody of voucher specimens, provenance records, SOPs, digitisation of specimen data, and restrictions on physical transfer of biological materials.

What it is NOT

• The NBA is not a constitutional body and not a body created by an executive resolution — it is a statutory body created by an Act of Parliament (the Biological Diversity Act, 2002).
• It is not under the Ministry of Tribal Affairs or the Ministry of Agriculture — it sits under the MoEFCC. (Do not confuse it with the Forest Survey of India, the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, or the National Tiger Conservation Authority, which are different MoEFCC bodies.)
• ABS is not a tax or a cess — it is a benefit-sharing obligation imposed as a condition of access approval, not a fiscal levy collected by the revenue department.
• The NBA is not the same as the National Green Tribunal (NGT) — the NGT is a judicial/adjudicatory body for environmental disputes; the NBA is a regulatory authority for biological-resource access.
• Biodiversity Management Committees are not the bodies that grant access approvals — that power rests with the NBA (and SBBs for Indian citizens/entities for commercial use). BMCs document and conserve local biodiversity.

The full set to remember

• The three-tier ABS chain: National Biodiversity Authority · State Biodiversity Boards / UT Biodiversity Councils · Biodiversity Management Committees — these are the institutions a "match the pairs" or "how many tiers" question turns on.
• The CBD family India belongs to: Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) · its Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (2000) · its Nagoya Protocol on ABS (2010). The Biological Diversity Act, 2002 is India's domestic implementing law for the CBD's third objective.
• Sibling national funds and registers: National Biodiversity Fund (Section 27), the People's Biodiversity Registers maintained by BMCs, and the documentation that feeds India's biodiversity governance.
• Compared with one peer mechanism: ABS is analogous in spirit to the FAO's International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (the "Plant Treaty") multilateral system of benefit sharing, but ABS under the CBD/Nagoya track is bilateral and applies broadly to genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge, whereas the Plant Treaty covers a defined set of food/forage crops.

Why it matters

The promise of the Biological Diversity Act has long outrun its delivery on the ground. A recurring criticism has been that ABS money, once realised, did not reliably reach the communities and conservation purposes the law intended — partly because there was no transparent, rule-bound formula for how to split the collections, and partly because the original source of a biological resource is often hard to trace once it has passed through traders and intermediaries. By fixing explicit percentage bands and tying each scenario to a specific section of the Act, the NBA's move addresses a real implementation gap: it converts a discretionary, case-by-case practice into a predictable rule that can be audited.

The community share — 60–75% where the source is identifiable — matters because the whole equity logic of the CBD rests on rewarding the custodians of biodiversity, often forest-dwelling and indigenous communities whose conservation labour and traditional knowledge make the resource valuable in the first place. Routing this through SBBs and UTBCs keeps the money close to the source areas. The fallback rule under Section 32, directing untraceable-source funds to the socio-economic development of source areas, ensures that money does not simply pool unused at the centre when paperwork is incomplete.

The repository reforms address a quieter but equally important problem: scientific integrity and provenance. Designated repositories hold voucher specimens — the physical reference samples that anchor taxonomic identity. Without strong provenance records, digitisation and custody rules, the link between a specimen, its origin community, and any downstream commercial benefit can break — which is exactly the link ABS depends on. Digitisation also makes India's biological holdings more usable for research while restricting careless physical transfer of material that could escape the benefit-sharing net.

For Mains