Under pressure from the jharkhand government, which has taken a unilateral decision to take over 288 acres of its land for a housing society floated by legislators and MPs, the Horticulture and Agro Forestry Research Programme (HARP) has written to the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) to immediately declare it a national repository of subtropical fruits for protection of plant genetic resources.

The move will give long-term legal protection to HARP’s experimental field laboratory under the National Biodiversity Act 2002. Sources in Ranchi and Delhi confirmed that citing the significance of the research being carried out in HARP’s Farm-2, which has been identified for takeover under the current move, the NBA has been requested for “necessary intervention”. The programme has a collection of about 240 germplasms of mango and litchi registered with the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources.

Considering the fact that the Biodiversity Act, 2002 has a provision to designate some premier institutions as repositories for keeping different categories of biological resources under safe custody and provide necessary legal protection to prevent the loss of valuable genetic resources from these centres, the move could save HARP’s research fields from the bulldozers. However, the procedure for declaring national repositories may take time, which in turn may not be of much help to the institute.

At present, five national institutes have been declared national repositories under the flora category, there are eight in the fauna category, and five in the microbes category.