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Biodiversity conservation: national efforts
India's biodiversity effort is a three tier structure under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, and money has begun to move through it: access and benefit sharing payouts crossed ₹200 crore, though much of that stops at the State boards rather than reaching a community. The harder work is the bottom tier, where 2.76 lakh Biodiversity Management Committees exist on paper and States have been told to make them function.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2023: Biodiversity Management Committees, the Nagoya Protocol and collection fees
- Prelims 2023: the body behind the Global Invasive Species Database
- Prelims 2023: the organism that performs the waggle dance
- Prelims 2018: why Prosopis juliflora is in the news
- Prelims 2017: consequences of a fall in butterfly populations
The Act, tier by tier
Who does what
National level
- National Biodiversity Authority, a statutory body in Chennai
- Decides access by foreign entities and fixes benefit sharing
State and UT level
- State Biodiversity Boards and UT Biodiversity Councils
- Regulate commercial use by Indian entities
Local level
- Over 2.76 lakh Biodiversity Management Committees, set up by local bodies
- Prepare People's Biodiversity Registers
- The Biological Diversity Act, 2002 is how India gives effect to the Convention on Biological Diversity at home.
- The Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023 made most offences civil rather than criminal, and Rules followed in 2024.
Where the benefit sharing money goes
- Under Section 32(2) of the Act, a board must spend the money it receives on conservation, People's Biodiversity Registers, Biodiversity Heritage Sites and community livelihoods.
- Where the provider of a resource cannot be identified, the money is shared out among State Biodiversity Boards and Union Territory Biodiversity Councils instead of reaching a community directly.
Invasive species: what is already in place
- The Forest Survey of India (FSI) has prepared an album of 45 major invasive plant species.
- The National Working Plan Code, 2023 provides for managing invasive species and for using native species in restoration.
- India has had no single national management plan for invasive species, which is the gap now being filled.
Why a pollinator is infrastructure
- The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) credits bee pollination with almost a third of global crop output.
- Yields improve in 87 of 115 leading food crops.
- The National Beekeeping and Honey Mission is where the Centre's support for beekeeping and honey sits.
Listening to an ecosystem
- Ecoacoustics reads distribution, abundance and behaviour off sound, which is what works in dense forest where little can be seen.
- Machine learning models that identify a species by its call have until now been trained mostly on Global North recordings.
What has happened
5 Sep 2026
The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) said its access and benefit sharing payouts have crossed ₹200 crore, and the Environment Minister then asked States to make their 2.76 lakh Biodiversity Management Committees functional.
- Seed companies had paid for vegetable seed bought in open markets, where no provider could be identified.
- That money went to the State boards and Union Territory councils by each State's crop area.
- The Minister asked that People's Biodiversity Registers become dynamic planning instruments, and that State rules be aligned with the 2023 amendment and the 2024 Rules.
PIB, 5 Sep 2026: National Biodiversity Authority Crosses ₹200-Crore Milestone in ABS Disbursement (opens in a new tab) · PIB, 6 Sep 2026: 16th National Meet of State Biodiversity Boards and Union Territory Biodiversity Councils held at Chandigarh (opens in a new tab)
17 Aug 2026
India's honey output was reported to have nearly doubled in a decade, and with it the case for safeguarding the pollinator behind it.
- Output rose from about 76,000 tonnes in 2013-14 to about 151,000 tonnes in 2025-26.
- India is the second largest producer after China and the third largest exporter by value.
- About 70 per cent of the honey is exported.
- Doubling bee colonies by 2030 is proposed under the National Beekeeping and Honey Mission.
11 Aug 2026
India's first open access ecoacoustic dataset was reported, nearly 100 hours of soundscapes recorded by ecologists and enthusiasts since 2025.
- It covers birds, insects, frogs, bats, reptiles and marine animals.
- Being crowdsourced and open, it can train models on Indian calls rather than borrowed ones.
The Indian Express, 11 Aug 2026: Where the wild things are heard (opens in a new tab)
10 Aug 2026
The Botanical Survey of India (BSI) handed the National Biodiversity Authority a State wise inventory of potential invasive species.
- That inventory will feed a National Management Plan of Invasive Species.
PIB, 10 Aug 2026: National plan on invasive alien species being prepared (opens in a new tab)