PIB Tracker₹3.79 crore for the brinjal, the chilli and the Sahiwal cow
The National Biodiversity Authority disbursed Access and Benefit Sharing money to 33 State and UT biodiversity boards, collected from seed companies that used Indian vegetable germplasm — and from Sri Lanka, for Sahiwal cattle semen.
What happened
- The National Biodiversity Authority disbursed close to ₹3.79 crore as Access and Benefit Sharing.
- It went to 33 State Biodiversity Boards and UT Biodiversity Councils, plus ICAR-NBPGR and the Hisar Bovine Sperm Station.
- The money was realised from seed companies accessing vegetable and oilseed genetic resources.
- An amount also arose from Sri Lanka for access to Sahiwal cattle semen.
- Distribution was proportionate to cultivation area using Ministry of Agriculture data.
For Prelims
- ABS: Access and Benefit Sharing — equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of biological resources and associated traditional knowledge.
- Legal basis: the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, aligned with the Nagoya Protocol (2010) under the Convention on Biological Diversity.
- The three-tier structure: the National Biodiversity Authority (Chennai), State Biodiversity Boards, and Biodiversity Management Committees at the local level.
- ICAR-NBPGR: the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, New Delhi — India's plant germplasm repository.
- Sahiwal: an indigenous (Bos indicus) dairy cattle breed; deep-frozen semen was accessed by Sri Lanka.
- The untraceable-source rule: where access was through markets or intermediaries, an Expert Committee's modalities apply and money is shared by cultivation area.
- Largest tranches: ₹148 lakh (germplasm bundle), ₹86.56 lakh (tomato), ₹83.76 lakh (chilli).
For UPSC: A rare, concrete ABS card — most answers on this stay abstract. Use it for the Biological Diversity Act and the Nagoya Protocol, biopiracy and farmers' rights, agrobiodiversity conservation, and the practical difficulty of tracing a genetic resource to its source community.
What it is NOT: ABS money here went to State boards and institutions, not directly to farmers or communities — and because the original source could not be traced, distribution followed cultivation area rather than any identified custodian community.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.14 · GS3.4 · Linkage L2
Anchor
Benefit sharing only works if you can name whose benefit it was — and in a seed market, usually you cannot.
Substantiation (data)
₹3.79 crore disbursed to 33 State and UT boards, with ₹148 lakh from a single germplasm bundle and ₹86.56 lakh from tomato varieties alone.
Exemplification
Sri Lanka's animal health department paid for access to deep-frozen Sahiwal semen, routed through the Haryana board to the Hisar station.
Problematisation
Where resources move through traders, the custodian community disappears from the transaction, and cultivation-area proxies send the money to States rather than to the farmers who conserved the landrace.
Way-forward
Strengthen Biodiversity Management Committees and People's Biodiversity Registers so provenance can be established before access, not reconstructed after it.
Position
A conservation incentive that never reaches the conservator is an accounting entry, not an incentive.
Deploys into: Conservation + agriculture (GS3.14, GS3.4) · the Biological Diversity Act and Nagoya Protocol, biopiracy and farmers' rights, and agrobiodiversity conservation.
Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · 2026-08-09 · PRID 2296731 · PIB source ↗