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BIODIVERSITY-INDIA: Lax Laws Worry Villagers, Activists

Keya Acharya

BANGALORE, May 7 2007 (IPS) - Five years after India enacted a seemingly pioneering, conservation-oriented law to preserve the country’s amazing diversity of flora and fauna, the Act remains bogged down by widespread protests from local communities, while civic groups protest the dilution of related environmental laws.

India houses eight percent of the world’s biodiversity on just 2.4 percent of global area, has one of the highest range of ecosystems (forests, wetlands, grasslands, marine areas, deserts), and is home to 137,000 wildlife species.

Its agricultural, cultural and livestock diversity is also amongst the world’s highest, having, for instance, over 50,000 rice varieties alone. Eastern Orissa state is recognised as the place where rice originated. Seventy percent of the country’s billion plus population depends on this rich biodiversity for its sustenance.

The Biodiversity Act 2002, advocates protection and sharing of benefits from natural resources with local communities involved and needs industry to take permission from government for acquiring biodiversity-related patents.

The law also requires India’s 28 States to set up Biodiversity Boards and Management Committees at local village level, and document ‘people’s biodiversity registers’ (PBRs).

A PBR then becomes a directory of natural resources, traditional and medicinal knowledge of plants and its compounds being used for centuries in the villages.

But local communities that are the main repositories of the knowledge of this biodiversity, now in great demand for medicinal and industrial trade, say that the new Biodiversity Rules, formulated in 2004, do not allow them adequate control over the knowledge they share for documentation.

“Community leaders are now ‘data providers’ while scientists and government are ‘validators’. Except for ascertaining scientific names, ‘experts’ have little association with the natural knowledge they are documenting,” says P.V. Satheesh of Deccan Development Society, a well-known non-governmental organisation (NGO) in southern Andhra Pradesh state.

There is no method of allowing communities themselves to validate what is being written about their knowledge, adds Satheesh.

In April 2007, over 2000 village governance institutions or Gram Panchayats Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa and Meghalaya States have each submitted resolutions saying they will not cooperate with the Biodiversity Board, unless given full control.

‘’Our knowledge is our heritage and not for sale. We shall not be compelled into any process that reduces it to a tradeable commodity that can be privatised,” says their memorandum.

‘’The Act actually endorses the current intellectual property patent regime, both by allowing permissions for it, and by exempting those seeking them under the Plant Varieties Protect Act”, adds Kanchi Kohli of the nationally-known NGO Kalpavriksh.

But K. Venkatraman, secretary of the National Biodiversity Authority of India, based in the southern Indian city of Chennai, is defensive, arguing that there are 27 existing laws linked to biodiversity to take care of legal issues.

“What we need to address is raising awareness on biodiversity and the need for its conservation. Currently major ongoing projects have no money allocated for this important issue.”

The Act is indeed linked to India’s other environmental laws on forests, wildlife, panchayati raj (village administration).

Unfortunately, the state of India’s environmental governance has itself come in for criticism from NGOs, local organisations and from the World Bank.

The WB report, published in April 2007, warns that India’s rapid industrialisation and economic growth is significantly polluting air and water and pressurizing its natural resources, according to Reuters.

In November 2006, 58 activists, researchers, parliamentarians and others countrywide wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, complaining that the Ministry of Environment blatantly disregarded their concerns on serious lapses in the amendments to the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process.

Clearance for projects under this system requires project proponents to apply to the Ministry of Environment with a detailed report that is subject to appraisal and public discussion before approval.

The amendments to the EIA became official in September 2006. The EIA now exempts construction projects, allows certain activities to post their own information without independent verification, curtails public hearing and requires half-yearly industry reports without independent monitoring.

States the protest to the Prime Minister: “Consultations for the amended EIA were held only with industry and central government representatives. State governments, panchayats and municipalities, NGOs, trade unions and local community groups were partially or completely kept out of the process.”

Singh has not replied that letter. Earlier in 2004, the ministry ignored a letter from the panchayats regarding the Biodiversity Rules.

“This has been the fate of each of the Open Letters we have issued in the last couple of years, to the ministry or to the Prime Minister,” says Ashish Kothari of Kalpavriksh, which specialises in biodiversity issues.

Kothari says the government is weak-kneed against corporate and international trade interests.

Proposed amendments to India’s coastal regulatory regime, or CRZ, too are causing anguish to local communities and fisher folk, whose livelihood rights have been left vague an undefined.

The amendments, proposed by a committee headed by well-known scientist, M.S. Swaminathan, asks for a scientific demarcation of the high tide line, but allows existing constructions to continue.

“This assumes that all the violations that have happened despite the CRZ in previous years is okay,” says Syed Liyakat of the Bangalore-based Equitable Tourism Options. ” Managing violations, instead of regulating them, is far more complex than the mess that we already have on our coastal areas.”

The only prominent publicly-formulated environmental policy was the GEF-sponsored National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP), in which the Environment Ministry supported the outcome of thousands of grassroots meetings and activities.

But here too, the final approval is being awaited since 2003, making India one of the few countries not to have an NBSAP.

India, however, has proved a resilient nation, and in spite of all the misgivings there are silver linings of positive action.

“We are doing our best,’’ says R.C. Prajapati, member-secretary of the Karnataka Biodiversity Board, home to the Western Ghats, a major biodiversity-hotspot. The board, effective since 2006, has set up 623 village biodiversity committees and proposed 17 projects so far.