Biodiversity Management Committees

Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs) derive their statutory authority from Section 41 of India's Biological Diversity Act, 2002, the domestic legislation enacted to give effect to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which India ratified in 1994. The Act establishes a three-tier institutional architecture: the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) at Chennai, the State Biodiversity Boards (SBBs) at the provincial level, and BMCs at the local self-government level. Section 41(1) mandates that every local body—panchayats and municipalities under the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments—shall constitute a BMC within its area of jurisdiction. The procedural detail is supplied by the Biological Diversity Rules, 2004, subsequently strengthened by the Guidelines on Access and Benefit Sharing issued by the NBA in 2014 and amendments brought through the Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023.

The constitution of a BMC follows a defined procedure. The local body—a village panchayat, municipal council, or equivalent urban body—forms a committee of a chairperson and not more than six members nominated by the local body, with a statutory requirement that not less than one-third of the members be women and not less than eighteen per cent belong to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The principal mandate under Rule 22 is the preparation, maintenance, and validation of the People's Biodiversity Register (PBR) in consultation with local communities. The PBR documents comprehensive information on the availability and knowledge of local biological resources, their medicinal use, and any other traditional knowledge associated with them. The committee also maintains a register of access requests, collection fees, and details of benefit-sharing.

Beyond documentation, BMCs perform an advisory and regulatory function. They advise the NBA and SBBs on matters relating to the use of biological resources and associated traditional knowledge within their jurisdiction. Critically, under the access-and-benefit-sharing (ABS) framework that operationalises the CBD's third objective and the Nagoya Protocol, BMCs are empowered to levy collection fees from any person accessing biological resources for commercial use within their area. The committee is the institutional repository of the third pillar of CBD—the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilisation of genetic resources—at the grassroots, ensuring that monetary and non-monetary benefits flow back to the communities that have conserved the resources.

The scale of BMC formation in India has expanded considerably. Following directions from the National Green Tribunal (NGT) in its 2016 order in the matter concerning the slow pace of implementation, the NBA reported a dramatic acceleration: by the early 2020s more than 270,000 BMCs had been constituted across states, with states such as Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra reporting near-universal coverage. The Kerala State Biodiversity Board has been among the most active, and the model of community-driven PBR preparation has been studied at institutions including the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru. The 2023 amendment, debated in Parliament and assented to in August 2023, fast-tracked clearances and decriminalised certain offences, drawing both support from industry and criticism from conservation groups.

BMCs must be distinguished from adjacent institutions. They are not Biosphere Reserves, which are landscape-scale UNESCO-designated conservation units managed under the Man and the Biosphere Programme. Nor are they Joint Forest Management Committees, which operate under forest departments for forest co-management, or the Gram Sabha-empowered bodies under the Forest Rights Act, 2006. The BMC's distinctive character lies in its documentation and benefit-sharing mandate rather than direct land management; it works alongside, not in place of, the State Biodiversity Boards, which handle access requests from Indian entities while the NBA handles foreign and non-resident requests under Sections 3 and 7 of the Act.

Controversy has attended the BMC framework. Audits and the NGT have repeatedly criticised the gap between the formal constitution of committees and the substantive completion of People's Biodiversity Registers—many BMCs exist on paper but have no functioning register or active membership. The imposition of collection fees on industries such as Ayurveda and seed companies generated litigation, most prominently the Divya Pharmacy v. Union of India case decided by the Uttarakhand High Court in 2018, which upheld the SBB's authority to demand fair and equitable benefit sharing even from domestic companies. The 2023 amendment's exemption of codified traditional knowledge and AYUSH practitioners from ABS obligations remains contested for potentially diluting the protection of community knowledge.

For the working practitioner—whether a UPSC aspirant addressing GS Paper III environment questions, an environment ministry desk officer, or a policy researcher—BMCs represent the decentralised, community-rooted instrument through which India localises its CBD and Nagoya Protocol commitments. They embody the principle that biodiversity conservation and the rights of communities over traditional knowledge are inseparable, and that benefit-sharing must reach the village level. Understanding the BMC three-tier linkage, the People's Biodiversity Register, and the ABS mechanism is essential for analysing the credibility of India's domestic implementation of international environmental law and the persistent tension between conservation, livelihood, and commercial bioprospecting.