PIB TrackerThe providers could not be traced, so ₹8.23 crore follows crop area
Access and Benefit-Sharing disbursement crossed ₹200 crore as the NBA sanctioned ₹8.23 crore to 32 State and UT bodies, split by cultivated area because no provider was traceable.
What happened
- The National Biodiversity Authority sanctioned ₹8.23 crore in Access and Benefit-Sharing proceeds to 27 State Biodiversity Boards and 5 Union Territory Biodiversity Councils, taking cumulative ABS disbursement past ₹200 crore.
- The proceeds were realised from M/s Nunhems India, M/s East West Seeds India and M/s Bayer Science and Innovation for access to bitter gourd, okra, chilli and onion for research and commercial utilisation.
- Because the resources were accessed through the open market or through traders, they could not be traced to specific individual farmers, communities or a single identifiable geographic source.
- A modality recommended by an Expert Committee and approved by the Authority therefore apportions the beneficiary share by area under cultivation, using Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare data.
- Madhya Pradesh receives ₹1,17,39,914 and Maharashtra ₹1,01,30,649 on more than 49 per cent of India's onion area; the ten largest recipients take ₹6.40 crore of the ₹8.23 crore.
For Prelims
- Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS): the arrangement under which a user of a biological resource pays the provider's share through the National Biodiversity Authority; cumulative disbursement has now crossed ₹200 crore.
- National Biodiversity Authority: the body that sanctioned the ₹8.23 crore tranche and approved the distribution modality recommended by an Expert Committee.
- Recipient bodies: 27 State Biodiversity Boards and 5 Union Territory Biodiversity Councils, with Biodiversity Management Committees named as bodies whose capacity the money must build.
- The four crops: bitter gourd (Momordica charantia), okra (Abelmoschus esculentus), chilli (Capsicum annuum) and onion (Allium cepa), accessed by three named seed companies.
- Section 32(2), Biological Diversity Act 2002: the provision that fixes what the money may buy — People's Biodiversity Registers, in-situ and ex-situ conservation, ecosystem restoration, Biodiversity Heritage Sites, BMC capacity building and community livelihoods.
- The substitute rule: where no provider is traceable, the share follows area under cultivation as published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.
- Largest recipients: Madhya Pradesh ₹1,17,39,914 on bitter gourd, chilli and onion; Maharashtra ₹1,01,30,649 on over 49 per cent of India's onion cultivation area; all remaining States and UTs together ₹1,82,88,892.
- International anchors named in the release: the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing, and Target 13 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
For UPSC: This is the cleanest available illustration of how India's benefit-sharing law actually moves money, and of where the chain breaks: use it wherever an answer needs the Authority-Board-Committee structure, Section 32(2) or the Nagoya Protocol made concrete rather than named. The traceability failure is the more valuable half, because it shows why a regime built on identifiable providers struggles once a resource passes through open markets. It also gives Target 13 of the Kunming-Montreal framework a number instead of a slogan.
What it is NOT: The release gives no measure of what the mechanism is missing: no count of users who accessed biological resources without an ABS agreement, no enforcement, penalty or prosecution figures, no number of agreements or claims behind the ₹200 crore, and no share of commercial biological-resource use that ABS actually captures. It also does not say whether any earlier disbursement reached individual community members or stopped in Board and Committee accounts, nor how much of the ₹200 crore has been spent.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.14 · GS2.9 · Linkage L2
Anchor
Benefit sharing is meant to close a loop: whoever commercialises a biological resource pays the people who conserved it. The National Biodiversity Authority's latest tranche closes that loop only halfway — ₹8.23 crore was collected from three seed companies, but no provider could be found at the other end, so the money went to State Boards instead.
Substantiation (data)
₹8.23 crore to 27 State Biodiversity Boards and 5 Union Territory Biodiversity Councils, realised from bitter gourd, okra, chilli and onion accessed by Nunhems India, East West Seeds India and Bayer Science and Innovation; cumulative ABS disbursement now above ₹200 crore. Madhya Pradesh takes ₹1.17 crore, Maharashtra ₹1.01 crore, and the ten largest ₹6.40 crore of the ₹8.23 crore.
Exemplification
Maharashtra's ₹1,01,30,649 shows the substitute rule working. It is not paid because Maharashtrian growers were shown to have supplied the onions a company used; it is paid because Maharashtra holds more than 49 per cent of India's onion cultivation area in the Agriculture Ministry's figures. Cultivated area is standing in for provenance.
Problematisation
The release itself records why the community link was lost: the companies accessed the material through the open market or through traders, so it could not be traced to specific farmers, communities or a single geographic source. Any resource that passes through a market arrives at the user stripped of exactly the provenance the statute needs to name a provider.
Counterpoint
Against reading this as failure, the alternative was to collect nothing at all. Section 32(2) still confines the money to People's Biodiversity Registers, in-situ and ex-situ conservation, ecosystem restoration, Biodiversity Heritage Sites, Biodiversity Management Committee capacity and community livelihoods, so it stays inside the conservation system even when it cannot reach a named provider.
Position
India's ABS regime has succeeded at collection and substituted a proxy for distribution. More than ₹200 crore raised, and this tranche disbursed by cultivated area rather than to identified conservers, satisfies the Nagoya Protocol's requirement to share while thinning its logic — that payment should reward the particular people whose stewardship kept the resource available.
Deploys into: Access and Benefit-Sharing under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002: how the money actually moves · Statutory and regulatory bodies (GS2.9): the NBA, State Biodiversity Boards and BMCs · Conservation finance and community stewardship (GS3.14) · India's obligations under the CBD, the Nagoya Protocol and KMGBF Target 13 · Case study: what a scheme does when it cannot identify its intended beneficiary
Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · 2026-09-05 · PRID 2307004 · PIB source ↗