PIB TrackerBenefit-sharing money with no claimant is split across 30 boards
The National Biodiversity Authority disbursed ₹2.82 crore of access and benefit-sharing funds to 27 State Biodiversity Boards, 3 UT councils and ICAR-IIHR, using a cultivation-weighted formula where no benefit claimer could be traced.
What happened
- The National Biodiversity Authority disbursed ₹2.82 crore of ABS funds.
- ₹2.80 crore went to 27 State Biodiversity Boards and 3 UT councils.
- The source was ₹2.94 crore from M/s Advanta Enterprises Ltd for vegetable hybrids.
- No benefit claimer could be traced, so shares followed cultivation across states.
- Total ABS released so far is ₹185 crore (USD 19.34 million).
For Prelims
- ABS: Access and Benefit-Sharing — payment for commercial use of biological resources under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002.
- NBA: the National Biodiversity Authority, which regulates access to biological resources and channels ABS money.
- Three-tier structure: the NBA, State Biodiversity Boards and Biodiversity Management Committees; 27 SBBs and 3 UT councils were paid here.
- Section 27: the provision of the Biological Diversity Act under which the NBA's residual ABS funds are utilised.
- People's Biodiversity Registers: local documentation of biological resources and associated knowledge, prepared by Biodiversity Management Committees — a permitted use of the funds.
- Nagoya Protocol: the Convention on Biological Diversity instrument on access and benefit-sharing of genetic resources.
- KMGBF Target 13: fair and equitable sharing of benefits from genetic resources and digital sequence information.
- The resources: 8 cauliflower, 5 hot pepper, 5 okra and 6 tomato hybrids; separately the strains Pseudomonas fluorescens and Trichoderma harzianum from ICAR-IIHR.
For UPSC: A rare worked example of benefit-sharing actually paying out, and of what a regulator does when the beneficiary cannot be identified. Use it for the Biological Diversity Act, the Nagoya Protocol and the Kunming-Montreal targets.
What it is NOT: This is not a payment to farmers — in this case no individual benefit claimer could be traced, so the money went to state biodiversity institutions instead.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.14 · GS2.18 · Linkage L2
Anchor
Benefit-sharing law assumes there is someone to share with, and a corporate acquisition can erase the paper trail back to the community that held the resource.
Substantiation (data)
₹2.82 crore disbursed — ₹2.80 crore to 27 State Biodiversity Boards and 3 UT councils, ₹2.01 lakh to ICAR-IIHR — out of ₹185 crore released by the NBA to date.
Exemplification
Advanta's cauliflower, hot pepper, okra and tomato hybrids came through an acquisition, so shares were apportioned by where those crops are grown: Gujarat ₹44.59 lakh, West Bengal ₹41.24 lakh.
Problematisation
A cultivation-weighted formula pays state boards rather than the communities whose landraces underlie the hybrids, and the further the recipient is from the resource the weaker the conservation incentive becomes.
Way-forward
Tie the state share to completed People's Biodiversity Registers and functioning Biodiversity Management Committees so the money rebuilds the traceability it could not find.
Position
India's benefit-sharing system has become good at collecting money and remains weak at finding the people it was collected for.
Deploys into: Conservation + international agreements (GS3.14, GS2.18) · the Biological Diversity Act, the Nagoya Protocol and how benefit-sharing money is actually spent.
Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · 2026-08-22 · PRID 2302262 · PIB source ↗