How companies got their way on biodiversity

Amendments to the Biodiversity Act let companies off the hook on having to share the benefits of using biological resources

A POLITICALLY well-connected yoga teacher with a passion for business has been instrumental in bringing about significant changes in India's pioneering law on biodiversity, which had won plaudits globally when it was enacted 20 years ago. Some critical features of the law have now been jettisoned with Parliament passing an amendment to the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 (BDA) on August 1.

It was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee which had formulated BDA two decades ago to protect India's rich but fast depleting wealth of biological resources. The aims of BDA were in line with the goals were set by the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), a global agreement to which India had acceded. But it had a special feature that was ahead of its time. It included a provision for fair and equitable benefit sharing or FEBS from the use of biodiversity, or the knowledge associated with such resources, for local communities who had through the ages protected and maintained the planet's biodiversity. This rule was codified much later by CBD into a supplementary agreement as the Nagoya protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing. It is this concept that has been given short shrift in the just passed amendment.