India as a Megadiverse Country
Chapter Nine
Syllabus topic 1, "Bio-diversity"
Pages 25 to 27 of 818
In one line
India is one of a small group of countries that hold most of the world's species, and that fact is the reason it has an access and benefit sharing statute at all.
In exam wording: India is recognised as one of the world's megadiverse countries; it is divided for conservation planning into ten biogeographic zones, and four of the world's biodiversity hotspots reach into it, the Himalaya, the Indo-Burma region, the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, and Sundaland; that concentration of biological wealth is what makes it a provider country under article 15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity 1992 and what the Biological Diversity Act 2002 exists to regulate access to.
Why this matters legally and not only geographically
Under the Convention of 1992 the world's States divide into providers of genetic resources and users of them. A provider country has the sovereign right affirmed by article 3 and the corresponding machinery of article 15, under which access is subject to its prior informed consent. India is a provider. That single fact explains the shape of the Indian Act: it is a statute about controlling outward flow, which is why sections 3, 4 and 6 are addressed to foreigners, non-resident Indians, and companies that are foreign or controlled by a foreigner.
A student who does not know that India is a provider country cannot explain why the Act is drafted the way it is.
Megadiverse countries
The idea of a small group of countries holding a disproportionate share of the world's species was developed in the 1980s and 1990s, and India has consistently been listed among them. The group formed itself politically as the Like-Minded Megadiverse Countries, which acted together in the negotiations that produced the Nagoya Protocol in 2010, and India has been an active member of it.
The ten biogeographic zones
Indian conservation planning divides the country into ten biogeographic zones: the Trans-Himalaya, the Himalaya, the Indian Desert, the Semi-Arid zone, the Western Ghats, the Deccan Peninsula, the Gangetic Plain, the North-East, the Coasts, and the Islands.
The classification is administrative rather than statutory. No section of any Act names the zones. They matter because the protected area network, and the recovery programmes for endangered species that the Supreme Court directed in Centre for Environmental Law, World Wide Fund for Nature-India v. Union of India, decided on 15 April 2013, are planned against them.
The hotspots
A biodiversity hotspot is an area with an exceptional concentration of species found nowhere else and an exceptional degree of threat. Four of them reach India: the Himalaya, the Indo-Burma region, the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, and Sundaland, which touches the Nicobar Islands.
The concept has no statutory force in India either. Its legal importance is indirect: the Western Ghats have been the subject of two expert reports and of repeated litigation, and K.M. Chinnappa v. Union of India (2002) 10 SCC 606, on mining in the Kudremukh National Park, was decided about a Western Ghats site.
India as a Megadiverse Country
What follows in law from all this
A provider country needs an access statute. That is the Biological Diversity Act 2002.
A country with a large protected area network needs a place statute. That is Chapter IV of the Wild Life (Protection) Act 1972.
A country whose forests are being converted needs a diversion control. That is section 2 of the Van Adhiniyam 1980.
A country whose medicinal plant trade is mostly wild-collected needs a regulation of collection. India does not have one, and that absence is Module III.
Worked example
A foreign university proposes to survey the microbial diversity of hot springs in the Himalaya and to deposit the isolates in its own collection. Work out what the Indian legal position is, using nothing but the fact that India is a provider country.
Step one. The isolates are micro-organisms, which section 2(c) of the Biological Diversity Act 2002 names as biological resources.
Step two. The activity is a survey or collection of species for a purpose, which is bio-survey and bio-utilisation under section 2(d), and it is also access under section 2(a).
Step three. The applicant is a foreign body. Section 3(2) names a person who is not a citizen of India, a citizen who is a non-resident, and a body corporate not incorporated in India or incorporated in India and controlled by a foreigner. Section 3(1) forbids such a person from obtaining any biological resource occurring in India for research or commercial utilisation without the previous approval of the National Biodiversity Authority.
Step four. Section 4 then controls what is done with the results: sharing or transferring any result of the research on the isolates to a person within section 3(2) needs the prior written approval of the Authority.
Step five. If the university later applies for a patent on a compound from an isolate, in or outside India, section 6(1) requires the prior approval of the Authority before the patent is granted, and the Authority may impose benefit sharing when it grants that approval.
Step six. The application is made and processed under the Biological Diversity Rules 2024, and any benefit sharing is determined under the Regulations of 2025.
The lesson. Everything in that answer flows from the single fact that India is a provider country. The Act is the machinery a provider country needs.
Limits and criticism
Neither the zones nor the hotspots are law. A student who writes that the Western Ghats are a protected area because they are a hotspot is wrong: what protects a particular place is a notification under a particular section.
India as a Megadiverse Country
The numbers vary. Estimates of how many species India holds differ between sources and are revised regularly, and this book does not print a figure it has not read from a primary source.
Quick revision
- India is a megadiverse and a provider country under the Convention of 1992.
- Ten biogeographic zones; four hotspots reach India: Himalaya, Indo-Burma, Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, Sundaland.
- Neither classification is statutory.
- Being a provider country is what explains sections 3, 4 and 6 of the Biological Diversity Act 2002.
- India acted with the Like-Minded Megadiverse Countries in the negotiations that produced the Nagoya Protocol.
Test yourself
1. Why is it legally significant that India is a provider rather than a user country? Because the Convention on Biological Diversity 1992 gives a provider country sovereign rights over its genetic resources under article 3 and the power to require prior informed consent under article 15. India's Act is therefore built around controlling access and outward transfer rather than around importing.
2. Does the designation of an area as a biodiversity hotspot give it legal protection in India? No. The concept has no statutory force. Protection comes from a notification under a specific provision, such as section 18 or section 35 of the Wild Life (Protection) Act 1972, section 37 of the Biological Diversity Act 2002, or a notification under section 3 of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986.
3. Which sections of the 2002 Act are addressed specifically to foreign persons, and why? Sections 3, 4 and 6. Section 3 requires prior approval before such a person obtains a biological resource; section 4 before research results are shared with or transferred to such a person; section 6(1) before any intellectual property right based on Indian biological material is granted to such a person. They exist because India is a provider country and the risk the Act was passed to address was the uncompensated outward flow of genetic material.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.