India, one among the mega biodiversity countries is considered as the
homeland of most diverse and rich traditional/tribal knowledge systems because of its
unique cultural expressions which are directly or indirectly associated with
biodiversity. The available information shows that there are 350-400 million tribal
people residing in 1.73 lakh villages located in and around the forest areas of India. In
spite of implementing various local/national/international programmes, the socio
economic conditions of these communities are still not much improved due to various
reasons like poor implementation of different welfare programmes, increased rate of
exploitation, non-scientific collection of natural bio resources, lack of scientific
approach on the part of the planners, policy makers, and administrators in
understanding the real problems and aspirations of local/tribal communities. Therefore,
we have adopted a new multi-disciplinary integrated approach with a view to upgrade
their skills, technologies and to make them capable of meeting the changing needs of
the communities. In this communication, the authors envisioned some of the activities
like creating mass awareness by capacity building programmes among the target group
through biodiversity management committees, developing user friendly data base on
Peoples Biodiversity Register (PBR), implementation of various biodiversity
conservation strategies, development of best practises, training on systematic and
sustainable collection of Non Wood Forest Produce (NWFP), semi processing, value
addition and marketing of medicinal/edible/aromatic plants. Further, introducing
entrepreneurial capacity building programme and establishment of a ‘Trust’ under the
patronship of BMC to implement various activities related to biodiversity conservation
and sustainable utilization are also envisaged. Apart from this; the authors highlighted
the functioning and connectivity of BMC for providing better livelihood opportunities
to tribal/local communities through implementing Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS),
programme.
Keywords: Access and benefit sharing, Medicinal and aromatic plants, People’s
biodiversity register, Sustainable utilization, Traditional knowledge.
