People's Biodiversity Register

The People's Biodiversity Register (PBR) derives its statutory authority from the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, enacted by India's Parliament to give effect to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), to which India became a party in 1994. Section 41 of the Act mandates that every local body constitute a Biodiversity Management Committee (BMC) for the purpose of promoting conservation, sustainable use, and documentation of biological diversity. Rule 22(6) of the Biological Diversity Rules, 2004 specifies that the main function of the BMC is to prepare the PBR in consultation with the local people. The instrument operationalises Article 8(j) of the CBD, which obliges parties to respect, preserve, and maintain the knowledge, innovations, and practices of indigenous and local communities. The PBR thus sits at the intersection of environmental law, intellectual-property protection, and decentralised governance under the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments.

Procedurally, the preparation of a PBR begins when a local body—a gram panchayat, municipality, or municipal corporation—constitutes a seven-member BMC, with a chairperson elected from among the members and mandatory representation including women and members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The BMC, supported by a Technical Support Group often drawn from universities, NGOs, or the State Biodiversity Board, conducts field surveys to inventory local flora, fauna, agro-biodiversity, domesticated stocks, microorganisms, and the landscape units in which they occur. Documentation captures the folk taxonomy, distribution, use-value, and economic significance of each resource, together with the traditional knowledge held by healers, cultivators, fishers, and pastoralists. The compiled register is structured into thematic sections covering ecosystems, species, and knowledge systems, and is periodically updated to reflect change.

The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), headquartered in Chennai and established under the Act in 2003, issues guidelines standardising PBR format, while the twenty-eight State Biodiversity Boards coordinate implementation within their jurisdictions. A critical procedural safeguard is that traditional knowledge recorded in a PBR is intended to function as defensive documentation, creating a verifiable record of prior art that can be invoked to challenge wrongful patent claims on Indian bioresources. The register also informs the access-and-benefit-sharing (ABS) mechanism: under Section 21 of the Act, when a commercial entity seeks access to a biological resource, the BMC must be consulted, and the PBR provides the evidentiary basis for the BMC to levy collection fees and negotiate equitable benefit sharing with knowledge holders.

By 2023 India had constituted well over 270,000 BMCs and prepared more than 250,000 PBRs across the country, following a directive from the National Green Tribunal that pressed states to complete the exercise. Kerala, through the Kerala State Biodiversity Board, was an early mover and completed PBRs across its grama panchayats, while Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra scaled up documentation through state-funded programmes. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in New Delhi treated PBR completion as a tracked national target. The intellectual ancestry of the instrument traces to a methodology developed in the 1990s by Madhav Gadgil and collaborators at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, whose pilot registers demonstrated that communities could systematically record their own ecological knowledge.

The PBR must be distinguished from the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a separate database created by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Ministry of Ayush that codifies documented systems such as Ayurveda, Unani, and Siddha to pre-empt foreign patents on classical formulations. Whereas the TKDL digitises textual knowledge from ancient manuscripts, the PBR records living, often unwritten, folk and community knowledge at the village scale. The PBR is likewise distinct from the Red List maintained by the IUCN, which assesses global extinction risk, and from a biodiversity heritage site declared under Section 37 of the Act, which is a spatial conservation designation rather than a documentary record.

Implementation has drawn sustained criticism. Many PBRs have been completed hastily to satisfy NGT deadlines, producing thin or duplicated entries that lack scientific verification and meaningful community participation. There is unresolved tension over data sovereignty: recording sensitive traditional knowledge in an accessible register can itself expose communities to biopiracy if access controls are weak, inverting the instrument's protective intent. The 2016 Bayer–Monsanto and earlier Divya Pharmacy litigation over benefit-sharing obligations exposed the gap between documentation and enforceable revenue flows to BMCs. The Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023 recalibrated several ABS provisions and exempted codified traditional knowledge and registered AYUSH practitioners from certain approval requirements, prompting debate over whether the change dilutes community control.

For the working practitioner—an environment-ministry desk officer, a UPSC aspirant addressing General Studies Paper III, or a CBD negotiator—the PBR exemplifies how an international treaty obligation is translated into village-level administrative practice. It is the documentary foundation on which India's ABS regime and its defensive intellectual-property strategy rest, and it remains a live instrument of decentralised environmental governance. Mastery of the PBR requires understanding not only its statutory mechanics but its persistent gap between formal completion and functional protection of community rights, a gap that defines contemporary biodiversity policy debate in India.