PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT OF BIOLOGICAL RESOURCES AND ASSOCIATED TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE UNDER ACCESS AND BENEFIT SHARING REGIME: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF INDIAN CASES ON BENEFIT SHARING

One of the biggest strengths of India as a nation is its rich natural and biological resources. It is a habitat to many unique flora and fauna which are exclusively found in India. India has been at the forefront in making various legislative provisions regarding the protection and conservation of its biodiversity for quite a long time now. What it has of late realised is the economic valuation of its biodiversity at large and the biological resources in particular, after witnessing various cases of bio-piracy where the biological resources and associated traditional knowledge very commonly found in India was misappropriated by the developed countries like U.S.A not once but a number of times by claiming exclusive proprietary rights over the resultant of use such biological resources & associated traditional knowledge through stronger patent regime under Intellectual Property Right Framework. To combat such situation of bio piracy and bio prospecting, India has legislated Biological Diversity Act, 2002 and has incorporated the concept of “Access and Benefit sharing” (ABS) arising out of use of bio resources and associated knowledge, under the Act. The objective of this paper is to critically analyse to what extent these novel principles of access and benefit sharing have been successful in India in the light of a few well-known cases of successful ABS agreements. The methodology which has been employed by the researchers for this paper is doctrinal and an analytical study. The authors while studying the various cases on access and benefit sharing have also employed the case-study method to study the effect and implementation of the same.”