The People’s Biodiversity Register (PBR) seeks to document the knowledge of occurrence, practices of propagation, sustainable harvests and conservation, as well as economic uses of biodiversity resources that reside with India’s local communities. The objectives of the programme would thus embrace the creation of decentralized country wide databases on

• A Status of biodiversity resources such as populations of medicinal plants, cultivars of fruit trees or freshwater fishes.
• A Various factors such as harvests from natural populations, changes in agricultural practices or discharge of industrial effluents, affecting the biodiversity resources.
• An Ongoing involvement of local communities /individuals in sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity resources, such as systems of regulated grazing on pastures, maintenance of varieties of fruit plants like jackfruit on farm bunds or protection of fish in sacred ponds.
• A Local knowledge, widely shared and publicly disclosed, of properties and uses of biodiversity resources e.g. drought-resistance of a certain cultivar, methods of preservation of food or use of certain plants in treating human or livestock diseases. Local knowledge only partially disclosed; for instance, a claim that a particular medicine woman knows of a cure for asthma.
• A Validate the information thus recorded for instance, through cross-checking with other published information sources.
• A Create a network of decentralized databases, ultimately linking them to a consolidated national Data base which would give full credit to the origin of information at the level of an individual, a community or a village panchayat.
• Feed pertinent information, such as volume of trade and prices of medicinal plants back to the local communities.