Parliament on Tuesday passed an amendment bill that specifies provisions for benefit sharing from biodiversity commerce with local communities and decriminalises biodiversity-linked offences, but had been decried by opponents as detrimental to biodiversity.

The Rajya Sabha passed the Biological Diversity (Amendment) Bill 2023 by a voice vote on Tuesday, triggering expressions of disappointment from the Congress’s Jairam Ramesh, a former environment minister, and others who had opposed the bill in its current form.

The Lok Sabha had passed the bill on July 25.

Union environment and forests minister Bhupender Yadav said the amendments would give more power to the tribals and local people, while promoting collaboration, a PTI report said. The bill would also help simplify the patent application process, Yadav said.

The bill, tabled in the Lok Sabha on December 16, 2021, had been referred to a joint committee of Parliament (JCP) amid concerns that the proposed amendments would favour industry. The JCP had examined the bill and made 21 recommendations.

Ramesh said the bill passed by the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha had rejected all but one of the recommendations of the JCP. “This is truly extraordinary and, in my recollection, unprecedented,” he said. “This is an insult to the collective and painstaking efforts of the JCP that spent over seven months studying the bill and held consultations with all stakeholders,” said Ramesh, who was a member of the JCP until June 30, 2022.

The bill that will soon become law is “the most retrograde and yet another example of the huge gap that exists between what the (Narendra) Modi government claims and actually does especially in the field of environment and forests where ease of doing business takes precedence over protection, preservation and regeneration”, Ramesh said in a statement.

Ramesh also said the bill completely destroyed the structure of the Chennai-based National Biodiversity Authority that was envisaged in the 2002 Act as an independent, professional organisation. The bill will bring in 16 New Delhi-based government officials as its members.

The JCP had recommended that penalties for biodiversity-related offences should be proportionate to the gains obtained by entities using bioresources illegally and the size of the company. But, Ramesh said, the bill provides for blanket decriminalisation and modest monetary fines that do not take into account the gains.

Several environmental groups had on Monday appealed to Rajya Sabha MPs not to approve the bill, arguing that it would dilute certain existing controls on access to the country’s bioresources and exempt Indian companies from provisions that require permissions from village-level biodiversity panels and state biodiversity boards.

“We’re disappointed this bill has passed, given its huge implications on biodiversity conservation,” said Nidhi Hanji, a lawyer and research associate with the Environmental Support Group, a Bangalore-based organisation that was among groups that had issued the appeal.

The ESG and multiple other groups had expressed concern that the amendments would lead to overexploitation of bioresources and accelerate the loss of biodiversity.