Unwilling to share?

A statutory body created to ensure that local communities get compensated for their traditional knowledge and products by entities that use them for commercial purposes has fallen miserably short of its target. Queries filed by Down To Earth (DTE) under the Right To Information (RTI) Act, 2005, show the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) disbursed less than 27 per cent of funds received from companies, institutions or individuals since 2008-09.

NBA was established in 2003 under the Biological Diversity Act (BDA), 2002, to conserve and enable sustainable use of biodiversity in the country. This is how this happens: Say, a forest-dwelling community specialises in catching snakes and extracting venom, which it sells to companies for research, NBA is responsible for ensuring the community gets adequately paid for its service by the buyer.

For this, BDA has set up a three-tier system—NBA at the Centre, state biodiversity boards (SBBs) at the state level and biodiversity management committees (BMCs) at the panchayat level to identify the bioresources. Traders and manufacturers of biodiversity products have the option to provide the communities and the collectors between 1 and 5 per cent of the purchase price or between 0.1 and 0.5 per cent of the sale price, depending on the scale of their commercial operations. The national and state biodiversity boards can retain 5 per cent of the payment, while 95 per cent has to go to BMCs or to the benefit claimers.

The regulations also mention that in case the “benefit claimers” cannot be identified the funds will be used to “support conservation and to promote livelihoods for local people from where the biological resources are accessed”. DTE’s RTI queries reveal that ...

This article was originally published in the October 16-31, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth