India’s Commitment to Biodiversity Protection: Policies and Practices

India occupies just 2.4% of the world’s land area, yet it shelters nearly 8% of all recorded species on the planet. This puts the country in an unusual position. It carries an outsized share of global biodiversity, which also means it carries an outsized responsibility to protect it. Over the past three decades, India has built a layered framework of laws, institutions, and international commitments to do exactly that. This post walks through how the country regulates the use of its biological wealth, the global agreements that shape its policies, and why it has pushed so hard at international forums to stop the theft of its traditional knowledge.

Why India’s biodiversity matters so much 🔗

India is one of just 17 megadiverse countries in the world, a label reserved for nations that hold the majority of Earth’s species. The reason lies in its geography. The country sits at the meeting point of several biogeographic zones, which lets species from different regions mix and overlap. The result is an extraordinary range of ecosystems packed into one country.

These ecosystems run from tropical rainforests in the Andamans, the Western Ghats, and the northeast to the cold, coniferous forests and alpine meadows of the Himalayas. Deciduous forests cover much of the central, eastern, and southern regions, while long coastlines support mangroves, coral reefs, and other coastal habitats. According to the IUCN, the country accounts for roughly 7-8% of all recorded species, including over 45,000 plant species and 91,000 animal species.

Four global biodiversity hotspots 🔗

Some regions are so rich and so threatened that they earn special status. India contains four of the world’s 36 recognised biodiversity hotspots: the Himalaya, the Western Ghats, the Indo-Burma region in the northeast, and Sundaland, which includes the Nicobar Islands. A hotspot is defined by two things at once. It must have a high number of species found nowhere else on Earth, and it must face serious threats to its survival. The Western Ghats alone, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, holds thousands of plant species and a remarkable concentration of amphibians found only there.

The law that anchors conservation: the Biological Diversity Act 🔗

The foundation of biodiversity protection in the country is the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. The law was passed to give effect to the country’s commitments under an international treaty, and it rests on three clear goals: conserving biological diversity, ensuring its sustainable use, and making sure that the benefits arising from the use of biological resources are shared fairly and equitably.

That third goal is the most distinctive part. For a long time, companies and researchers could take a plant, microbe, or piece of local knowledge, develop a profitable product, and give nothing back to the communities that had nurtured that resource for generations. The Act tries to close that gap.

What the Act actually controls 🔗

The law sets clear limits on who can access the country’s biological resources and on what terms. A few of its core features stand out:

Prior approval for foreign access: No foreign individual, company, or non-resident can obtain any biological resource occurring in the country, or knowledge associated with it, for research or commercial use without previous approval from the regulating authority.

Benefit sharing: When approval is granted, the authority must ensure that benefits flow back to the local bodies and communities who are the actual custodians of the resource or knowledge. This can take the form of monetary payments, joint ownership of intellectual property, or transfer of technology.

Defined sustainable use: The Act defines sustainable use as using components of biodiversity at a rate that does not cause long-term decline, so that future generations can still meet their needs.

Strict enforcement: Offences under the Act are treated as serious. Grievances over benefit sharing or authority orders are taken to the National Green Tribunal.

The institutions that make it work 🔗

A law is only as strong as the bodies that enforce it. The Act created a three-tier structure that runs from the national level all the way down to the village.

The National Biodiversity Authority 🔗

At the top sits the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), a statutory and autonomous body set up in 2003 and headquartered in Chennai. It works under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. The NBA plays three roles at once. It facilitates legitimate access to resources, it regulates that access by granting or refusing approvals, and it advises the central and state governments on conservation and sustainable use. It also helps states identify areas of special biodiversity value that can be designated as heritage sites.

State boards and village committees 🔗

Below the NBA are the State Biodiversity Boards, set up across the states to handle access requests from Indian citizens and companies. The third and most local tier is the network of Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs). Under Section 41 of the Act, every local body must constitute a BMC to promote conservation and sustainable use within its area. Tens of thousands of these committees now exist across the country. Their most important tool is the People’s Biodiversity Register, a document that records local knowledge about plants, animals, and their uses, building an evidence base that belongs to the community.

The global framework: the Convention on Biological Diversity 🔗

Domestic law did not appear in a vacuum. It grew directly out of an international agreement. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, nearly all the world’s nations signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The Convention has the same three objectives that later shaped the 2002 Act: conservation, sustainable use, and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from genetic resources. India signed the CBD in 1992, and the Biological Diversity Act was the legislative response to that commitment.

The CBD does not stand alone. It is supported by other agreements, most notably the Nagoya Protocol, which deals specifically with access to genetic resources and benefit sharing. Together these instruments form the international backbone that guides national biodiversity policy.

From Aichi targets to a new global framework 🔗

In 2010, the parties to the CBD adopted a ten-year roadmap known as the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, built around 20 measurable goals called the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. These covered everything from raising public awareness to expanding protected areas and preventing the extinction of threatened species.

As a signatory, the country developed its own set of 12 National Biodiversity Targets aligned with the Aichi framework, integrated into the National Biodiversity Action Plan. When the Aichi period ended, the global community adopted a new plan, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and the country has since been updating its national targets to match this newer agenda.

Restoring forests and protected areas 🔗

A central thread running through these targets is the expansion of forest cover and protected areas. About 24.6% of the total land area is currently under forest, and the country has committed to restoring degraded land and increasing tree cover as part of both its biodiversity and its climate goals. The protected-area network of national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and conservation reserves is the main vehicle for in-situ conservation, meaning protection of species within their natural habitats.

Fighting biopiracy and the push to amend TRIPS 🔗

This is where the country’s biodiversity policy becomes a story of international advocacy. The problem it confronts is called biopiracy: the unauthorised use of biological resources or traditional knowledge by corporations, usually through patents, without permission or fair compensation.

Three landmark cases 🔗

Three episodes turned biopiracy from an abstract worry into a national concern.

Turmeric: In 1995, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to researchers for using turmeric to heal wounds, a remedy used in Indian households for generations. India challenged the patent by producing references from ancient Sanskrit and Urdu texts proving the knowledge was centuries old, and the patent was revoked.

Neem: A patent on a fungicide derived from neem oil was granted at the European Patent Office. India and its partners challenged it on the grounds that neem’s properties were long-established prior knowledge, and the patent was eventually revoked for lack of novelty.

Basmati: In 1997, a US company, RiceTec, won a patent after crossing basmati with a Western strain and claiming it as its own invention. The case exposed how the rules around patenting biotechnological processes could be used to appropriate a product cultivated in the subcontinent for centuries.

Why TRIPS is the target 🔗

These cases pointed to a structural flaw in global trade rules. The World Trade Organization’s agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) sets the international standards for patents but does not require a patent applicant to disclose where a genetic resource came from, or whose traditional knowledge it draws on. That silence is what makes biopiracy easy. A company can patent something based on community knowledge without ever revealing the source.

For years, the country has argued at the WTO that TRIPS should be amended to make disclosure of origin mandatory. Applicants would have to declare the country of origin of any genetic resource and identify the community whose knowledge they used. This demand finally gained ground in 2024, when the World Intellectual Property Organization adopted a treaty requiring such disclosure, an outcome that India had championed for decades.

The defensive shield at home 🔗

Alongside its advocacy abroad, the country built its own defences. The most important is the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a database that documents traditional medicinal knowledge from systems like Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani in formats that patent examiners worldwide can search. By making this knowledge searchable as prior art, the TKDL allows patent offices to reject dubious applications before they are ever granted, which is far cheaper than fighting them afterward. The Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023, which came into force in 2024, updated the original law, easing compliance for domestic AYUSH practitioners while tightening rules on foreign access.

The challenges that remain 🔗

The framework is comprehensive on paper, but gaps remain in practice. Awareness of the law among local bodies is uneven, and many Biodiversity Management Committees exist on record without being fully active. Enforcement of benefit-sharing provisions has been inconsistent, and habitat loss continues across all four hotspots, driven by urbanisation, agriculture, and climate stress. Even the new disclosure rules at the international level have limits, since non-disclosure is not yet treated as grounds to cancel a patent. The institutions are in place; the harder task is making them work fully on the ground.

What do you think? Given that India holds a disproportionate share of global biodiversity while occupying a small fraction of the world’s land, should wealthier nations that benefit from genetic resources bear a larger share of the cost of conserving them? And is documenting traditional knowledge in databases like the TKDL the best way to protect it, or does turning living community knowledge into a fixed record carry risks of its own?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_India
2. https://byjus.com/free-ias-prep/biodiversity/
3. https://lotusarise.com/biodiversity-hotspots-upsc/
4. https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/2046
5. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/548841/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Biodiversity_Authority
7. https://www.cbd.int/doc/strategic-plan/2011-2020/aichi-targets-en.pdf
8. https://whc.unesco.org/en/glossary/217
9. https://medcraveonline.com/MOJES/national-aichi-biodiversity-target-1-an-assessment-in-india.html
10. https://anantamias.com/biopiracy/
11. https://www.mondaq.com/india/patent/586384/traditional-knowledge-and-patent-issues-an-overview-of-turmeric-basmati-neem-cases
12. https://www.legacyias.com/biopiracy-neem-turmeric-case-studies-upsc-notes/
13. https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/biodiversity-act-2002/