Can People’s Biodiversity Register contribute to conservation?

In India and globally, the loss of biodiversity is becoming a major threat. Two recent reports by WWF and CSE respectively highlight this challenge for several species that have either gone extinct or are at the brink of extinction.

In an attempt to preserve our vast biodiversity, the Indian government enacted the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. The act, besides provisioning for a three-tier structure in the form of the national and state biodiversity boards and biodiversity management committees (BMC) at the local level, also brought forth the concept of the People’s Biodiversity Register (PBR) to record the local and traditional knowledge of our biological heritage.

PBR is not a new policy initiative. It began as an initiative from a group of people scientists decades ago, grew into a people’s movement before being co-opted by a government-led mandate in the form of the Biological Diversity Act, which makes it compulsory for BMCs to prepare the registers. While it was true that the PBR has had varying levels of success in its multiple lives, there is still hope that preparing PBRs can prove to be an effective strategy to preserve traditional biological knowledge.

The current structure of the Biological Diversity act places the register at the centre of its focus, insisting that registers be prepared by each Biodiversity management committee, and the respective state biodiversity board be an appellate authority to ratify the register. Preparation of PBRs is now mandated under Section 41(1) of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, with as many as 2,48,156 PBRs prepared nationwide till April 2021 as per the National Biodiversity Authority.

PBR as an unfulfilled promise

People’s Biodiversity Registers have faced scepticism since its inception as many considered it another futile exercise with good intentions but one that fails to pass the test of the field. Nationwide, while there have been several instances of efficient use, the register has often flattered to deceive, failing to fulfil the promises it sought to achieve in its original framework.

The challenges in preparing PBRs start at the stage of collection of primary information. On paper, information is to be generated by the BMC comprising of local community members. However, in practice, it is often prepared by a technical support group composed of professors, teachers and students from a scientific background. In practice, the role of the BMC gets relegated as often BMCs have themselves not been constituted properly as per their norms or worse, they may have been dormant after their constitution.

On top of that, while the initial thrust of PBRs was to prepare a knowledge repository by local communities, the onus has tended to shift to state governments who constitute mega-projects to prepare such registers.

Various international agencies have funded state governments for the preparation of PBRs. Such conversion of PBRs into project-specific output has led to further alienation from the community-owned initiative that PBRs had set out to be.

The underlying fear is that PBRs, which began as an attempt to document local knowledge, should not turn into a government-mandated exercise that, once completed, remains filed in a government office and is of little use to the local population.

While PBRs document knowledge of biological resources, a benefit of the document is that it can act as a legal backup for traditional knowledge of local flora and fauna. In order to do so, a few states have taken the route of preparing master checklists of floral species. While this reduces the actual time spent on the field, it also leads to a lazier form of data collection wherein the focus is to complete the survey quickly and cross-verify it with the master checklist. There is a fear that rapid data collection methodologies will lead to a homogeneity of results with local niches overlooked.

Another growing fear is related to the slew of orders on the compulsory preparation of PBRs in all the local bodies where BMCs are operational. However, this is fraught with danger as often BMCs themselves are not operational or, if operational, are not known to be active. Also, as PBRs are mandated to be compulsory, they are often being prepared to satisfy the provisions of the act. This has led to an enormous spike in costs and sourcing of funds rather than concentrate on producing less but effective PBRs.

The need of the hour is to reimagine PBRs. However, it is not an easy task as its mandate has been taken away from the realm of locals and civil society groups into a government-mandated project. The various formats which were prepared for the ease of collecting data have now transformed PBRs into a holy grail of datasheets with little scope of innovation on the part of the data collector.

A progressive vision for PBRs

PBRs can contribute enormously to the conservation of the rapidly dwindling biodiversity of the country. As PBRs are integral to the Biological Diversity Act, they can address the key objectives of conservation, sustainable use of resources and access and benefit-sharing, keeping in mind the fact that the register has legal protection against misuse of external appropriation.

PBRs in biodiversity-rich areas can serve as a guardian for bio-resources as any use of biological resources will be processed only after the prior informed consent of the local communities. PBRs could also serve as a legal backup for accessing benefits from commercial usage of the bio-resource. In an effort to protect traditional knowledge, it was decided in the twelfth national meeting of State Biodiversity Boards to keep traditional knowledge contained in PBRs out of the public domain.

Another role envisaged for PBRs was that of elders transferring their myriad understanding of natural heritage to the increasingly disconnected younger generation. PBR can combat this loss of knowledge by recording the biological and cultural resources. It can ensure that the locally known biological resources are identified, new species are recorded, and most importantly, the traditional knowledge of the region is preserved and shared with the younger generation.

Globally, as more reviews acknowledge the importance of inclusion of nature education from an early age, PBRs have the potential to play a major role in education at a local level. Additionally, PBRs should be mandatorily referenced while conducting an environmental impact assessment for a new project. PBRs could also be used in the declaration of Biodiversity Heritage Sites with a verified presence of rare bioresources, thereby according an added layer of protection for endangered flora and fauna.

Significantly, preparation of PBRs can also be an employment generation activity, with many states undertaking efforts to document such knowledge. Training of field staff in the collection and entry of data can be done through the Green Skill Development Programme (GSDP). Potential local youth leaders can also be trained as biodiversity warriors on coordination of PBR with other acts such as the FRA. Such training can be particularly useful for developing new livelihood activities such as ecotourism in these regions.

However, one needs to be cautious to avoid historical traps while preparing PBRs. The knowledge that is being documented in the PBR is situated in the local context. It collects information on the context-specific socio-natural relations with the local biodiversity from an ecological perspective. It needs to record not only the traditional economic use of the local biological resources which may not necessarily be exploitative, but also the other traditional non-economic associations of local communities with the local biodiversity such as sacred groves, horrible or pleasant incidents of the human-wildlife encounters, and also how these associations have changed over time. Capturing and recognising these relationships over time could be a step to ensure that PBRs stay relevant and with ownership exhibited by local communities.

However, to capture these relationships, participation of the local communities is a must, as the prescribed process for PBRs suggests. Further, the endorsement of these documents by Gram Sabha should not be side-lined as a procedural hurdle that slows down the process. Instead, community meetings should be seen as an opportunity to discuss and incorporate the knowledge and relationships of those sections of local communities that were missed while preparing the PBR. Such discussions around the PBR would not only promote local participation but would help deepen the local democracy. Local participation is also essential to ensure that PBRs do not end up being instruments to satisfy regulatory bodies.

Kunal Sharma, Samita Vasudevan and Shashank Deora