PIB TrackerRs 1.04 crore shared out by crop area, because nobody can be named
The National Biodiversity Authority has distributed access-and-benefit-sharing money from three seed companies to 27 State boards and two UT councils in proportion to cultivation area - because the farmers who hold the resource cannot be identified.
What happened
- The National Biodiversity Authority disbursed around Rs 1.04 crore of Access and Benefit-Sharing money among 27 State Biodiversity Boards and two UT Biodiversity Councils.
- The contributions came from Crystal Crop Protection, Savannah Seeds and Nunhems India for access to pearl millet, jowar, maize, rice and bottle gourd for research and commercial purposes.
- Because the resources are procured through markets, traders or intermediaries and individual benefit claimers cannot be identified, the NBA used an area-based approach, allocating by cultivation area from the Unified Portal for Agricultural Statistics.
- Allocations: Uttar Pradesh Rs 10.36 lakh, Maharashtra Rs 10.05 lakh, Madhya Pradesh Rs 9.81 lakh, then Bihar, West Bengal, Karnataka, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Rajasthan, with Rs 29.34 lakh for the rest - total Rs 1,03,63,188.
- The agriculture sector has generated about Rs 87 crore in ABS contributions and the NBA has released over Rs 204 crore in all; the framework rests on the Biological Diversity Act 2002 (amended 2023), the Rules 2024 and the ABS Regulations 2025, with India presenting at a CBD COP 17 side event in Yerevan on 28 October 2026.
For Prelims
- ABS - access and benefit sharing - is the third objective of the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), after conservation and sustainable use. The Nagoya Protocol (2010, in force 2014) operationalises it through prior informed consent and mutually agreed terms between the provider and the user of a genetic resource.
- India's machinery is three-tiered: the National Biodiversity Authority at Chennai for foreign entities and transfers of research results, State Biodiversity Boards for Indian entities, and Biodiversity Management Committees at local body level, which maintain People's Biodiversity Registers. Section 21 of the 2002 Act provides for determining fair and equitable benefit sharing.
- The 2023 amendment exempted registered AYUSH practitioners and cultivated medicinal plants from benefit-sharing obligations, decriminalised offences in favour of penalties, and sought to encourage investment - it was criticised for narrowing the base of ABS payers, which is context for why agriculture now supplies the larger share.
- Why individual claimants vanish: a seed company buying grain in a mandi cannot trace it to the cultivator or community that conserved the variety. The Act contemplates payment to benefit claimers - conservers and holders of traditional knowledge - and the area-based route is the administrative substitute when they cannot be identified.
- Target 13 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (2022) calls for effective measures to ensure fair and equitable sharing of benefits from genetic resources, digital sequence information and associated traditional knowledge - digital sequence information being the contested frontier, since a genome can be used without physical access to the organism.
- The parallel farm regime: the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act 2001 provides a National Gene Fund and recognises farmers' rights to save, use and sell seed, with benefit sharing on registered varieties - a separate channel from the Biological Diversity Act for the same crops.
- The crops named are all staples with deep landrace diversity: pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) and jowar (Sorghum bicolor) are climate-resilient millets promoted since the International Year of Millets 2023; bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) is a vegetable crop whose hybrids depend on local germplasm.
- CBD COP meetings run biennially - COP 15 at Montreal adopted the global framework, COP 16 was at Cali - and COP 17 is to be held in Yerevan, Armenia; India's updated National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan is its national instrument under the framework.
For UPSC: A rare worked example of ABS actually paying out, with the state-wise arithmetic and the methodological problem both on the record. Deploy it on biodiversity governance and the Nagoya Protocol, on farmers' rights and genetic resources, and on India's commitments under the Kunming-Montreal framework.
What it is NOT: No information on what the three companies paid against what they earned, so whether Rs 1.04 crore is a fair share of the commercial value is unknowable - and the Act's test is fairness. No account of how State boards have spent earlier ABS receipts, no audit, and no statement of how much of the Rs 204 crore released to date has reached Biodiversity Management Committees or actual benefit claimers rather than board accounts. Nothing on whether the area-based method was consulted on, and nothing on digital sequence information, which Target 13 explicitly covers.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.14 · GS2.20 · Linkage L2
Anchor
The National Biodiversity Authority has distributed about Rs 1.04 crore of access and benefit-sharing money from three seed companies to 27 State Biodiversity Boards and two UT councils, allocated by cultivation area because individual benefit claimers could not be identified.
Substantiation (data)
The contributions relate to pearl millet, jowar, maize, rice and bottle gourd. Allocations run from Uttar Pradesh at Rs 10.36 lakh and Maharashtra at Rs 10.05 lakh to Rs 29.34 lakh shared among the remaining States, totalling Rs 1,03,63,188. Agriculture has generated about Rs 87 crore of ABS contributions and the Authority has released over Rs 204 crore in all. The framework rests on the Biological Diversity Act 2002 as amended in 2023, the Rules of 2024 and the ABS Regulations of 2025, and supports Target 13 of the Kunming-Montreal framework; India will present at a CBD COP 17 side event in Yerevan on 28 October.
Position
Money actually moving is worth noting, because ABS has been largely declaratory for two decades. Using published cultivation-area statistics to allocate where no claimant can be identified is a defensible second best - it is transparent, auditable and avoids the alternative, which is that the obligation lapses entirely and the companies keep the value of the germplasm for nothing.
Counterpoint
But the principle is being quietly inverted. Benefit sharing exists to reward the communities that conserved a resource; paying State boards in proportion to acreage rewards the States that grow the most of a crop today, which is a different thing altogether - and farmers who maintain landraces in marginal areas receive nothing. At about Rs 3.6 lakh per board, the sums are too small to fund conservation, and without any disclosure of what the companies earned from the resource, the Act's test of fairness cannot be applied at all.
Way forward
Publish the basis of assessment - what was paid against what commercial use - and the utilisation of earlier ABS receipts by State boards, including what reached Biodiversity Management Committees. Where claimants cannot be traced in a mandi chain, route the money to the People's Biodiversity Register areas that hold the landraces rather than to the largest-acreage States.
Conclusion
A real payout under a law that rarely produces one, distributed by a method that concedes it cannot find the people it is meant to pay. The second half is the part worth fixing before COP 17.
Deploys into: Biodiversity governance and the Nagoya Protocol · Farmers rights and genetic resources · Kunming-Montreal framework · Benefit sharing in practice
Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · 2026-10-24 · PRID 2328118 · PIB source ↗