After more than three years of its proposal, the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India Bill (NBRA Bill), which could not be introduced during the last several sessions of Parliament due to several other pressing issues, has ultimately been introduced in Parliament.

Even though several important Bills related to pharma and health sectors have been waiting for quite some time to be introduced in Parliament for its final nod, only the NBRA Bill has been finding a place among the tentative list for transaction of business for the last several sessions of Parliament. But, till the last session, one issue or the other took precedence over the NBRA Bill.

The NBRA Bill seeks to make NBRA as an independent, autonomous, statutory agency to safeguard the health and safety of the people of India and to protect the environment by identifying risks posed by, or as a result of, modern biotechnology, and managing those risks through regulating the safe development and deployment of biotechnology products and processes.

The Bill is being introduced to establish Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India to regulate research, import, transport, use of organism and product produced from modern biotechnology. It seeks to set up the NBRA as an independent, autonomous, statutory agency to safeguard the health and safety of the people and to regulate the safe development and deployment of biotechnology products and processes in the country. Once in place, the Authority will have overriding powers on matters related to the development and deployment of biotechnology products and processes in the country.

The Bill has been drafted by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT). After issuing the draft bill, in order to garner the views of all stakeholders across the country, the DBT had organised deliberations with the experts in major cities like Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. The department had received thousands of written comments at national and international levels besides the comments of around 700 experts with whom the department had physically interacted. Besides, the DBT had received comments from 32 states.

After incorporating all the relevant suggestions, the DBT issued a final draft Bill which has now been introduced in Parliament.