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What happened
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and the National Biodiversity Authority have jointly launched a five-year project to strengthen grassroots biodiversity governance in Tamil Nadu and Meghalaya. The initiative focuses on empowering Biodiversity Management Committees at the local level, improving People's Biodiversity Registers, and ensuring benefit-sharing under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. The project targets two ecologically distinct states — one in the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, the other in the Indo-Burma hotspot.
02 Understand
Why it matters
This project sits at the intersection of two exam-critical frameworks: the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 and the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS), which India ratified in 2012.
The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), established under the Biological Diversity Act, is the apex body for biodiversity regulation in India. Below it operate State Biodiversity Boards (SBBs) and, at the grassroots level, Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs). BMCs are mandated to be constituted by local bodies — panchayats and urban local bodies — and are responsible for preparing People's Biodiversity Registers (PBRs), which document local biological resources, their uses, and traditional knowledge.
Tamil Nadu lies within the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, one of 36 globally recognised hotspots defined by Conservation International. Meghalaya falls within the Indo-Burma hotspot and is notable for its community-conserved areas and rich ethnobiological knowledge.
The Nagoya Protocol, adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2010 and entered into force in 2014, mandates that benefits arising from the use of genetic resources be shared equitably with the source communities. India operationalises this through the NBA's benefit-sharing determinations.
For the examiner, this event revives the three-tier structure of biodiversity governance in India — NBA → SBB → BMC — and the role of PBRs as living legal documents, not merely academic records. The choice of states also signals the hotspot geography angle that UPSC regularly tests.
The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), established under the Biological Diversity Act, is the apex body for biodiversity regulation in India. Below it operate State Biodiversity Boards (SBBs) and, at the grassroots level, Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs). BMCs are mandated to be constituted by local bodies — panchayats and urban local bodies — and are responsible for preparing People's Biodiversity Registers (PBRs), which document local biological resources, their uses, and traditional knowledge.
Tamil Nadu lies within the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, one of 36 globally recognised hotspots defined by Conservation International. Meghalaya falls within the Indo-Burma hotspot and is notable for its community-conserved areas and rich ethnobiological knowledge.
The Nagoya Protocol, adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2010 and entered into force in 2014, mandates that benefits arising from the use of genetic resources be shared equitably with the source communities. India operationalises this through the NBA's benefit-sharing determinations.
For the examiner, this event revives the three-tier structure of biodiversity governance in India — NBA → SBB → BMC — and the role of PBRs as living legal documents, not merely academic records. The choice of states also signals the hotspot geography angle that UPSC regularly tests.
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