Gurugram: The deputy commissioner of Gurugram has constituted an expert committee to oversee the creation of people’s biodiversity registers (PBR) across the district, in compliance with the Biodiversity Act, 2002. This committee will supervise the work of 203 biodiversity management committees (BMC) that will be formed at the panchayat level, as well as one that has been constituted by the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG).
As per the Biodiversity Act, every urban local body (ULB) in the country is mandated to prepare a such a register for areas within their jurisdiction. These PBRs will serve as a repository of information on plants, animals (wild and domestic) and crops (agricultural biodiversity), along with traditional knowledge of their place in local ecosystems.
“The PBRs will be compiled by various BMCs based on primary data obtained through field inspections, as well as secondary data, which will be obtained from ‘line departments’, including the forest and wildlife, agriculture, fisheries, horticulture and animal husbandry departments,” said Gulshan Ahuja, chairman of the Haryana State Biodiversity Board (which was formed in August 2018 to ensure implementation of the Biodiversity Act’s provisions).
So far, 6,437 such BMCs have been formed across various urban local bodies in Haryana, at the panchayat, zila parishad and municipal levels. Each of these will be overseen by a seven-member district level expert committee, to be chaired by the deputy commissioner. The district forest officer (DFO) will serve as the member secretary of the committee, which will also have one independent expert, and a member each from the various line departments involved.
According to an order issued by the deputy commissioner earlier this month (a copy of which is with HT), the mandate of the expert committee will be to provide secondary data to BMCs as per their requirement, and to verify the data provided by BMCs in their draft PBR. According to an official aware of the matter, “Around 75 villages in each district are expected to provide draft PBRs by March 31, while draft PBRs for all ULBs in the state are expected to be prepared by September. The expert committee will scrutinise these, before submission for final approval to the environment ministry.”
{{/usCountry}}According to an order issued by the deputy commissioner earlier this month (a copy of which is with HT), the mandate of the expert committee will be to provide secondary data to BMCs as per their requirement, and to verify the data provided by BMCs in their draft PBR. According to an official aware of the matter, “Around 75 villages in each district are expected to provide draft PBRs by March 31, while draft PBRs for all ULBs in the state are expected to be prepared by September. The expert committee will scrutinise these, before submission for final approval to the environment ministry.”
{{/usCountry}}A senior MCG official, requesting anonymity, said, “The MCG has recently formed its BMC at the instruction of the urban local bodies department. The committee is being chaired by the mayor, and will feature five other members, including independent experts.” The official did not, however, clarify who the other members of this committee are. Vinay Pratap Singh, commissioner, MCG and Amit Khatri, deputy commissioner, Gurugram, did not respond to request seeking comment for this story.
Preliminary PBRs for all of Haryana’s 126 administrative blocks have already been prepared with the help of technical support groups (consisting of experts from universities, NGOs and advocacy groups). “However, we now have to prepare even more detailed, granular registers at a ward and panchayat level that will be the purview of the BMCs and expert committees,” Ahuja said.