The Difficulties in the Legal Regulation of Medicinal Plants

In one line

Eight difficulties, each stated as a problem a regulator actually faces, and the provision that half answers it.

MU set this as a whole question in 2024. The question is not what the law says about medicinal plants. It is why the law does not work, and an answer that recites statutes without naming the difficulties will not score.

In exam wording: the difficulties in the legal regulation of medicinal plants are the absence of any statutory definition; the narrowness of the protection in Chapter IIIA of the Wild Life (Protection) Act 1972, which reaches only a specified plant listed in Schedule III; the resulting unregulated harvest of every other wild species; the division of authority among the National Biodiversity Authority, the State Biodiversity Boards, the Biodiversity Management Committees, the Chief Wild Life Warden, the forest department, the drug licensing authority and the Registrar of Plant Varieties; the difficulty of proving whether material is wild or cultivated, on which the exemptions in the proviso to section 7 and in section 40 of the Biological Diversity Act 2002 now turn; the ownership of traditional knowledge, and the exclusion of codified traditional knowledge for Indians from the definition of benefit claimers in section 2(aa); the informality of the trade, in which the collector, the trader and the manufacturer are separated by several transactions; and the pull of intellectual property, since section 3(p) of the Patents Act 1970 excludes traditional knowledge from patentability inside India but cannot bind a foreign office.

MU's own phrase. Her printed words are the difficulties in legal regulation of medicinal plants, and the eight below are the answer to them.

One: no definition

Dealt with in full in the chapter on what a medicinal plant is. The short point is that a plant is regulated according to which other category it falls into, and it can fall into several at once.

The provision that half answers it. Section 2(i) of the Forest Rights Act 2006, which includes medicinal plants and herbs in minor forest produce.

Why only half. Because that definition operates for the purposes of that Act and gives the collector a right; it does not create a control on harvesting.

Two: the wildlife statute barely reaches plants

Section 2(27) defines a specified plant as a plant specified in Schedule III. Chapter IIIA applies to nothing else. Section 9 protects any wild animal in Schedule I or Schedule II wherever found; there is no equivalent general protection for plants.

The provision that half answers it. Section 61, the power of the Central Government to amend a Schedule by notification, and section 38 of the Act of 2002, the power to notify a threatened species and prohibit or regulate its collection.