Loading…
The National Biodiversity Authority released Rs 8.22 crore to three research institutions and 33 State Biodiversity Boards and Union Territory Biodiversity Councils - one of the largest single access and benefit-sharing disbursements for rice.
The money came from M/s Pioneer Overseas Corporation, an international seed company, for using Indian rice (Oryza sativa) varieties to develop and commercialise hybrids.
Rs 2.47 crore went to research institutions that conserved and shared the varieties, of which ICAR-Indian Institute of Rice Research, Hyderabad received Rs 2.43 crore and Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Uttarakhand received Rs 3.26 lakh.
Rs 5.75 crore was distributed to 33 State and UT biodiversity bodies in proportion to rice-growing area as recorded in the Unified Portal for Agricultural Statistics, with Uttar Pradesh receiving the highest share of over Rs 73 lakh.
The NBA has received about Rs 83 crore in ABS payments from the agriculture and seed sector alone, and its total ABS disbursements across all sectors have crossed Rs 162 crore.
A country's plant varieties, microbes and traditional knowledge have commercial value: a seed company can breed Indian rice landraces into a profitable hybrid, a pharmaceutical firm can build a drug on a plant used by a forest community. ABS is the rule that whoever takes such a biological resource out of a country must obtain prior approval and share a fair part of the resulting benefit with the country, the institutions that conserved the resource and the communities that hold the knowledge. In India the mechanism is statutory: the National Biodiversity Authority approves access by foreign entities and levies the benefit-sharing amount, then distributes it downward - here, part to the institutions that maintained the rice germplasm and part to the States in proportion to the area where the crop is actually grown.
Simple Analogy: It works like a royalty. The seed company had a commercial hit; the collections and the growing regions that supplied the raw material get paid a share of the takings rather than nothing at all.
India's law on conservation, sustainable use and fair and equitable sharing of benefits from biological resources. It creates the three-tier structure - the National Biodiversity Authority at the national level, State Biodiversity Boards at the State level and Biodiversity Management Committees at the local level - and it is under Section 8 of this Act that the NBA was established
Act No. 10 of 2023. It simplified compliance, eased the patent application route, encouraged cultivation of wild medicinal plants and facilitated Indian systems of medicine, and decriminalised offences under the parent Act by replacing imprisonment with monetary penalties ranging from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 50 lakh
A supplementary agreement to the Convention on Biological Diversity, adopted on 29 October 2010 at COP10 in Nagoya, Japan and in force from 12 October 2014. India ratified it on 9 October 2012. It gives the international legal basis for the benefit-sharing that the NBA administers
Opened for signature at the Rio Earth Summit on 5 June 1992 and in force from 29 December 1993, with its secretariat at Montreal. Its three objectives are conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of its components, and fair and equitable sharing of benefits from genetic resources - the third of which this disbursement gives effect to
Statutory and autonomous body established on 1 October 2003 under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. It regulates access to India's biological resources and associated traditional knowledge by foreign entities, levies and distributes benefit-sharing amounts, and performs facilitative, regulatory and advisory functions for the Government
The State tier of the three-tier structure. They regulate access by Indian entities and, as here, receive and spend ABS money on conservation of native crop diversity, ecosystem restoration, documentation of traditional knowledge and support to local farmers and knowledge holders
The local tier, constituted at village, municipality and other local body level. Their core task is preparing the People's Biodiversity Register documenting local biological resources and associated traditional knowledge
The national rice research institute, at Rajendranagar, Hyderabad. It began in 1965 as the All India Coordinated Rice Improvement Project, later became the Directorate of Rice Research, and was upgraded to institute status as IIRR from 15 December 2014. It received the largest institutional share of this disbursement for the germplasm it conserved and shared
The other university recipient. Inaugurated on 17 November 1960 as the Uttar Pradesh Agricultural University, it was the first agricultural university of independent India and was renamed in 1972 after Govind Ballabh Pant; it was central to the Green Revolution's high-yielding varieties
India's ABS regime is a direct response to the era of neem, turmeric and Basmati patent disputes, when Indian genetic resources and traditional knowledge were commercialised abroad without permission or payment
The BMC's register is what makes a benefit-sharing claim provable at the local level - without documentation of who held which resource and which knowledge, the money has no defensible route down to communities
The State-wise allocation is essentially a ranking by rice-growing area - Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Telangana, Odisha, Chhattisgarh - which doubles as a check on India's rice-producing States
The Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001 and its Gene Fund address farmers' rights over varieties, running parallel to the Biological Diversity Act's benefit-sharing route
GS Paper 3 > Conservation, Biodiversity and Environmental Legislation
General Awareness > Environment and Static GK
The Biological Diversity Act and the Nagoya Protocol are recurring UPSC Prelims topics, and the 2023 amendment has raised their frequency
The requirement that anyone accessing a country's biological resources or associated traditional knowledge share a fair part of the resulting benefits with the country, conserving institutions and knowledge-holding communities
A local record of biological resources and associated traditional knowledge prepared by the Biodiversity Management Committee
Asian cultivated rice - the species whose Indian varieties were used to breed the commercial hybrids that generated this benefit-sharing payment
The 2030 target calling for fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the utilisation of genetic resources, including associated traditional knowledge
The living genetic material - seeds, tissue - conserved by institutions such as ICAR-IIRR, from which new varieties are bred