Nearly a decade after becoming a party to the international environmental agreement – the Convention on Biological Diversity, India enacted in 2002 the Biological Diversity Act. This law aims at regulating the conservation, sustainable use and access to biological resources, for which it enables the setting up of new institutions, puts into force rules, agreements and so on. There is no doubt that this law is of significance to local communities, people’s groups, research institutes, and international and national interests seeking to utilise India’s megadiverse biological resources and related knowledge.

As this Guide is being written, the implementation of this legislation is currently underway. National and State level institutions have been established and community level structures are being constituted in several parts of the country. However, the implications of the decisions, approvals, and processes related to the legislation have a critical bearing on the conservation and ‘management’ of biodiversity. Unfortunately, these processes are far from widely known and the community linkages are not fully understood.

At another level, analysis indicates that this present legal framework is not fully equipped and in many ways contrary to the interest of the communities when it comes to their control over biological resources. The Biological Diversity Act and its implementation will have direct implications for local communities and people-centred conservation. Therefore it is critical that communities who are directly or indirectly dependent on bioresources know how the law will affect them, and how they in turn can influence its implementation and future course.

This Guide to the Act is an attempt to explain its provisions to people in a simple manner moving away from legalese. The focus is largely on the rights and responsibilities of communities in biodiversity conservation.  The Guide also explains the provisions regarding access, control and benefit-sharing. It also briefly touches upon the overlaps that the said law has with other related legislation on seeds, plants and people’s knowledge.

It is hoped that through an understanding of the Biodiversity legislation concerned people would be aware of the positive and negative provisions and their overall impact on both resource and knowledge conservation and community control. Accordingly, it is hoped this will be a step towards empowering people to work for changes that are needed in the existing regime and use available spaces, if any, while reiterating the traditional practices and customary laws of our people that pre- date this new law.

This publication is part of the Biodiversity Information Pack, produced by Kalpavriksh, Grain  and IIED.