For (a) scuttling a people-led process for preparing the country's National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan
(NBSAP), (b) weakening its own earlier process of enacting legislation that could have helped to protect traditional knowledge and biodiversity, and (c) opening up of its legal regimes to IPRs on life forms.

The NBSAP process, carried out through 2000-2004 under the overall control of the Government of India's Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), with funding from GEF/UNDP, has widely been hailed as one of the world's
most participatory exercises. It resulted in a detailed report in 2003-end, that laid out how the country's biodiversity could be conserved while ensuring the livelihood security of indigenous peoples and local communities most dependent on biodiversity. It also laid great stress on securing the
rights (including knowledge and ecological rights) of communities, in the face of growing global threats of biopiracy and ecological destruction.

Unfortunately, since 2004, the MoEF has been sitting on this report, and has made even made attempts to discredit it in various ways. Indian civil society organisations have gone ahead and published the report and released
it in functions across the country, but the MoEF is yet to accept it.

Interestingly, the Indian delegation to COP7 was the one that asked for a 2006 deadline for all countries to finalise their NBSAPs (a commitment under the CBD). Ironically, it has itself not yet met this deadline, which is not
surprising given how it has turned its back on the outputs of the NBSAP process.

Coupled with this is the weakening of a potentially strong Biological Diversity law, which the Indian Govt. had passed in 2002, by the notification of extremely weak Rules under the law in 2004. These Rules provide hardly any space for communities to take part in decision-making regarding biodiversity. Most damaging, they mandate that all communities are to produce "biodiversity knowledge registers", but provide no powers to the communities to protect the knowledge in these registers, thereby opening up
traditional knowledge to biopiracy.

Finally, India has gradually opened up its IPR regimes to life forms (once completely prohibited), including plant variety rights and patents on micro-organisms. The MoEF has been party to this, rather than opposing it as it should have done in its role as protector of India's environment and the
rights of communities most dependent on the environment.

A final additional elements of "Hook"ness (if one was needed!), is the acceptance of Bt Cotton and potentially other GE crops, now being spread across the Indian countryside with little attention to the ecological and health consequences.