Access and Benefit-Sharing remains more promise than practice in India. Critically examine with reference to the Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023.

Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) is required by the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 and the Nagoya Protocol. Under it, anyone who commercially uses India's biological resources must share the gains with the communities that conserve them. The 2023 Amendment made compliance easier, but money still reaches those communities too slowly and too thinly.

Promise: Where ABS Delivers

• Revenue mobilised: the NBA realised Rs 21.26 crore in FY 2025–26, with the seed sector as the largest contributor [2].
• Easier compliance: the 2023 Amendment decriminalised offences and simplified access. PIB credits these reforms with a surge in IPR filings [3].
• Practical distribution: in Oct 2026, Rs 2.02 crore from seed companies went to 27 SBBs and 3 UTBCs. Where individual claimers could not be traced, it was divided by crop cultivation area, and each State's share was published [1].
• Convergence: the funds are meant for BMCs, People's Biodiversity Registers (PBRs) and landrace conservation, linked with PM Van Dhan Yojana [1].

Practice: Where It Falls Short

• Collection–disbursal gap: at one point Rs 266 crore had been realised but only Rs 145 crore disbursed [2]. Cumulative disbursal has now reached Rs 202 crore [1].
• Thin, skewed payouts: the top 10 States took Rs 1.43 crore of the Rs 2.02 crore [1]. The area formula rewards the acreage under a crop, not the conservation of landraces.
• Communities sidelined: benefit claimers no longer negotiate directly. Terms are now agreed between the user and the BMC, which the NBA represents. There is also no prior informed consent mechanism, unlike under Nagoya [4].
• Codified-TK loophole: "codified traditional knowledge" is left undefined. The JPC warned this could deny benefits to most local knowledge holders [5].
• Weaker deterrence: jail terms were replaced with fines of Rs 1–50 lakh, decided by government officers [4].
• Opacity: there is no public data on how BMCs function or on how much benefit actually reaches people [4].

Way Forward

• Pay BMCs whose PBRs record the landrace used first, then split the remainder by area.
• Define codified TK narrowly, limited to the texts in the First Schedule of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, as the JPC recommended [5].
• Require BMC-level spending reports and time-bound transfers.

ABS has moved from a statute to a steady source of revenue, but the communities it is meant to pay still benefit mostly on paper. Distribution centred on communities, narrow exemptions and transparent spending would turn the promise into practice. This would also advance KMGBF Target 13 and SDG 15.