THE draft of the Biological Diversity Act which is soon expected to be tabled in Parliament, is full of loopholes, says Vandana Shiva, director the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. If the Act comes into force, it would permit foreign interest to continue to exploit the Indian market and would not do much to conserve the species, she says. Recently, the Union ministry for environments and forests formulated the Act and sent it to the state governments for their comments.

The Union government is formulating the Act which is aimed at implementing the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The CBD is an international treaty which aims at protecting biodiversity, guaranteeing to individual states sovereign rights over biodiversity and the patterns of its utilisation. Shiva says that the present draft has not implemented any clause of the convention of biodiversity.