MoEFCC and the National Biodiversity Authority 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 and improving Access and Benefit Sharing compliance under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. Tamil Nadu and Meghalaya were selected as pilot states, representing peninsular and northeast India's biodiversity-rich zones. The project aims to mainstream biodiversity into local planning frameworks and strengthen People's Biodiversity Registers across gram panchayats.

This project sits at the intersection of two critical biodiversity governance instruments established under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002: Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs) and People's Biodiversity Registers (PBRs).

The Biological Diversity Act, 2002 created a three-tier institutional structure: the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) at the national level, State Biodiversity Boards (SBBs) at the state level, and Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs) at the local body level. BMCs are mandated to be constituted by every local body — gram panchayats, municipalities, and cantonment boards — under Section 41 of the Act.

The People's Biodiversity Register is a community-maintained document recording local biodiversity, knowledge, and practices. It is the primary tool for documenting traditional knowledge, which directly feeds into the Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) mechanism. ABS ensures that when commercial entities use biological resources or associated traditional knowledge originating from India, communities receive a fair share of benefits — this is operationalised through the Nagoya Protocol (2010) under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

India ratified the Nagoya Protocol in 2012. The NBA is the national nodal authority for ABS approvals. Choosing Tamil Nadu (Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot) and Meghalaya (Indo-Burma hotspot overlap) is significant because both states have high endemic species density and active tribal traditional knowledge systems. This project directly strengthens the CBD's Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework target of community-based conservation.