LLM Group 6 Environment and Legal Order Biological Diversity and Legal Order 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

Wild life is protected on a different footing. The Act of 1972 protects scheduled animals, specified plants and the habitats in which they live, largely by prohibition rather than by permission and payment. Article 48A of the Constitution directs the State to safeguard the forests and wild life of the country, and Article 51A(g) makes compassion for living creatures a fundamental duty of every citizen. Those two provisions are the constitutional anchor for everything that follows.

Medicinal plants: importance

Medicinal plants are the material base of the Indian systems of medicine. The Act of 2002 recognises this directly: section 2(ea) defines codified traditional knowledge as knowledge derived from the authoritative books specified in the First Schedule to the Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940, which are the classical texts of Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani.

They matter equally to modern pharmacology. Reserpine came from sarpagandha (Rauvolfia serpentina), paclitaxel from the bark of the yew, and artemisinin, whose discovery earned Tu Youyou the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015, from sweet wormwood used in Chinese traditional practice. A plant that a community has used for generations is very often the lead a laboratory follows.

Medicinal plants: need for protection and impact of use

The need arises because most of the trade is supplied from the wild, and the law's hold on wild harvest is indirect. The strict controls turn on the species or the place: a specified plant in Schedule III to the Act of 1972, a plant growing inside a sanctuary or National Park, or a species notified as threatened under section 38 of the Act of 2002. Broader controls follow the produce and its buyer. Bark, resin and kuth are forest produce under section 2(4) of the Indian Forest Act 1927 wherever they are found, and other plants when taken from a forest, so their movement falls under State transit rules; a commercial user must give the State Biodiversity Board prior intimation under section 7 of the Act of 2002, and the Board may restrict or reject the activity under section 24(2); Gram Sabhas may regulate access to community forest resources under section 5 of the Forest Rights Act 2006; and State minor forest produce laws control trade in listed produce.

None of these routinely caps the quantity of a common plant gathered on private land or other land that is not forest, and even where they apply, enforcement is weak. That is where the need for protection is sharpest.

The pharmacy argued that benefit sharing was confined to foreigners, since sections 3, 4 and 6 speak of foreign persons and section 21 attaches to approvals granted to them. The High Court rejected the argument. It held that benefit sharing must be read from the scheme of the Act and India's treaty commitments, that section 7 requires an Indian to give prior intimation to the State Board, and that section 23(b) empowers the Board to regulate that access, including by demanding benefit sharing.

Other High Courts have divided on that reading of the unamended Act. Staying a demand in Hygienic Research Institute Pvt. Ltd. v. H.P. State Biodiversity Board on 24 May 2024, the Himachal Pradesh High Court said in an interim order that it could not agree with Divya Pharmacy and that sections 23 and 24 prima facie gave a Board no power to claim a benefit share from an Indian company. The Chhattisgarh High Court, in a final judgment of 13 August 2026 in Vadera Enterprises v. State of Chhattisgarh, upheld a Board's two per cent levy on traders buying tendu leaves at State auctions. Since 1 April 2024 section 23(ba) has expressly given State Boards the function of fixing benefit sharing, as the Authority's regulations provide, when they grant approvals; that power looks forward only, and the earlier demands remain for the courts to decide.

Agriculture depends on them. Nitrogen-fixing Rhizobium feeds legumes, and the insecticidal gene in Bt cotton came from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. Science depends on them too: the heat-stable enzyme from Thermus aquaticus, a bacterium first isolated from a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park, made the polymerase chain reaction practical, and with it modern diagnostics and forensic DNA analysis.

Micro-organisms: need for protection and impact of use

The need is of a different kind from the need of a tiger. A microbe is rarely endangered in the popular sense; what is lost when a soil, a hot spring or a gut flora is destroyed is genetic information that has never been described. Section 39(3) of the Act of 2002 therefore requires anyone who discovers a new taxon to notify a designated repository and deposit a voucher specimen, and regulation 10 of the Biological Diversity (Access to Biological Resources and Knowledge Associated thereto and Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits) Regulations 2025 governs the deposit of novel microbial strains in repositories outside India.

Parliament then inserted section 3(j) into the Patents Act 1970 by the amendment of 2002. It excludes plants and animals in whole or in part, including seeds, varieties and species and essentially biological processes, but it expressly excludes micro-organisms from the exclusion. Section 10(4)(ii) requires a biological material that cannot be described to be deposited under the Budapest Treaty and its source and geographical origin to be disclosed, and section 25(1)(j) makes non-disclosure a ground of opposition.

Protection of wild life: importance and need

Wild life is important because ecosystems function through it. Predators regulate herbivores that would otherwise strip forests, pollinators and seed dispersers regenerate vegetation, and scavengers remove carcasses that would spread disease. Section 2(a) of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 defines the environment to include the inter-relationship between land, water, air, human beings, other living creatures, plants and micro-organisms, so harm to wild life is harm to the environment in law.

Protection of wild life: impact

The impact of protection is visible in numbers. The All India Tiger Estimation released on 29 July 2023 put the mean tiger population at 3,682, up from 2,967 in 2018, and the Gujarat census of May 2025 counted 891 Asiatic lions, up from 674 in 2020. Protected areas, tiger reserves under section 38V and the prohibition on trade explain much of that recovery.

Protection also has costs, and the law has had to recognise them. Villagers living inside areas notified under section 18 face restrictions on fuel, fodder and forest produce while their rights await settlement. In Pradeep Krishen v. Union of India, (1996) 8 SCC 599, Madhya Pradesh allowed villagers to enter national parks and sanctuaries to collect tendu leaves because final notifications had never issued. The Supreme Court directed the State to complete the enquiry into rights and issue final notifications under sections 26A and 35 with urgency, and section 18A(2), inserted later, now obliges the State to make alternative arrangements for fuel, fodder and forest produce until rights are settled.

Conclusion. Medicinal plants, micro-organisms and wild life are important for different reasons, need protection against different threats and produce different impacts when used or protected, and Indian law meets them with three different techniques: benefit sharing and prior intimation under the Biological Diversity Act 2002, a patent regime that excludes plants and animals but admits micro-organisms under section 3(j) of the Patents Act 1970, and prohibition backed by protected areas under the Wild Life (Protection) Act 1972. Divya Pharmacy extended benefit sharing to Indian users, a reading on which High Courts have since divided for earlier demands while section 23(ba) provides for it from 1 April 2024, Chakrabarty and Dimminaco made engineered microbes property, and Sansar Chand and Pradeep Krishen show both the necessity and the human cost of protecting wild life. The unfinished task common to all three is the same: to regulate what is taken from the wild without shutting out the communities whose knowledge and forests made these resources valuable in the first place.