PIB TrackerWhen no benefit claimer can be found, the money follows crop acreage
The National Biodiversity Authority disbursed Rs 2.02 crore collected from seven seed companies to 27 States and three Union Territories, taking cumulative sharing to Rs 202 crore.
What happened
- The National Biodiversity Authority disbursed Rs 2.02 crore among 27 States and 3 Union Territories as their share of access and benefit-sharing contributions.
- The money came from seven seed companies for the use of rice, eggplant, cauliflower, cucumber, hot pepper, bottle gourd, bitter gourd, tomato and okra varieties and hybrids.
- Where resources were bought through markets or traders and individual benefit claimers could not be identified, shares were apportioned by cultivation area from the agriculture ministry’s statistics.
- The top ten States took Rs 1.43 crore, led by Madhya Pradesh (Rs 23.81 lakh) and West Bengal (Rs 23.33 lakh).
- Cumulative ABS disbursement reaches Rs 202 crore, to be used for Biodiversity Management Committees, People’s Biodiversity Registers and conservation of traditional varieties.
For Prelims
- The architecture: the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 creates three tiers - the National Biodiversity Authority at Chennai, State Biodiversity Boards, and Biodiversity Management Committees in every local body. It is the law giving effect to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
- Access and benefit-sharing: anyone commercially using a biological resource or associated traditional knowledge shares the benefit with the conservers. The international instrument is the Nagoya Protocol, adopted 2010, in force 2014, to which India is a party.
- Benefit claimer: the Act’s term for the conserver of a biological resource or the creator or holder of the associated traditional knowledge. The whole ABS mechanism rests on identifying one - which is exactly what failed here.
- People’s Biodiversity Register: a local record of biological resources and associated knowledge, prepared by the Biodiversity Management Committee. It is the document that would identify a benefit claimer, which is why the same money is being spent on updating it.
- Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: adopted at CoP15, Montreal, 2022, with 23 targets for 2030. Target 13 covers fair and equitable benefit-sharing from genetic resources; Target 19 covers resource mobilisation.
- What comes next: CoP17 to the Convention meets at Yerevan, Armenia from 19 to 30 October 2026, alongside the sixth Meeting of the Parties to the Nagoya Protocol - nine days after this disbursement.
- The 2023 amendment: the Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023 exempted cultivated medicinal plants and registered AYUSH practitioners from benefit-sharing and replaced imprisonment for offences with monetary penalties.
- Why seed companies pay: commercial hybrids are bred from landraces and farmers’ varieties collected from the field, so a seed firm using an Indian biological resource owes a share of its revenue under the Act, collected by the NBA and passed down.
For UPSC: A rare worked example of access and benefit-sharing actually paying out, with the amounts, the payers and the apportionment rule all on record. Deploy it on the Biological Diversity Act and its three-tier structure, on the Nagoya Protocol and the Kunming-Montreal targets ahead of CoP17, and on the practical difficulty of making a community-rights law work when the community cannot be identified.
What it is NOT: The release does not say how much was collected in total or what share of company revenue it represents, so whether Rs 2.02 crore is a fair return on the commercial use of these crops is unanswerable. It does not name which jurisdictions received nothing, nor how many cases had an identifiable benefit claimer who was paid directly. No figure for how much of the cumulative Rs 202 crore has actually been spent by the State boards, and no account of what it bought - the uses are listed as possibilities, not as outcomes. And nothing on how many People’s Biodiversity Registers are complete, which is the gap behind the whole apportionment problem.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.14 · GS2.9 · Linkage L1
Anchor
The National Biodiversity Authority disbursed Rs 2.02 crore to 27 State Biodiversity Boards and three Union Territory councils - money collected from seven seed companies for the commercial use of nine crops - taking cumulative access and benefit-sharing disbursement to Rs 202 crore.
Substantiation (data)
The top ten States took Rs 1.43 crore, about 71 per cent of the tranche, led by Madhya Pradesh at Rs 23.81 lakh and West Bengal at Rs 23.33 lakh, with Odisha, Bihar and Gujarat next. Thirty jurisdictions were paid out of 28 States and 8 Union Territories, so six received nothing. The crops are ordinary market vegetables and rice, not exotic genetic material.
Position
The apportionment rule deserves attention. The Act was written to reward the conserver - the benefit claimer who maintained a landrace or holds the knowledge. When the resource is bought through a trader, that person cannot be traced, so an expert committee substituted cultivation area as the proxy and the money goes to the States with the most acreage under the crop. It is a defensible administrative fix and it quietly converts a community entitlement into an intergovernmental transfer.
Counterpoint
The alternative is worse. Holding the money until every benefit claimer is identified would mean never disbursing it, and the funds are directed to exactly the institutions that would make identification possible in future - Biodiversity Management Committees and People’s Biodiversity Registers. Read that way, the proxy is a bridge rather than a substitution, provided the registers actually get completed.
Way forward
Two numbers would settle whether this mechanism works: how much of the cumulative Rs 202 crore the State boards have spent, and how many People’s Biodiversity Registers are complete enough to name a benefit claimer. CoP17 at Yerevan from 19 October, with the Nagoya Protocol parties meeting alongside, is where India will be asked for both.
Conclusion
Benefit-sharing is one of the few environmental laws that moves money towards conservers rather than away from them. On this evidence it moves about two crore rupees at a time, and towards acreage rather than towards the people the Act had in mind.
Deploys into: Biological Diversity Act and ABS · Nagoya Protocol and the Kunming-Montreal framework · Community rights and identification problems · Decentralised environmental institutions
Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · 2026-10-10 · PRID 2321791 · PIB source ↗