SIGNING THE HIGH SEAS: India and the BBNJ Agreement's Marine Genetic Resources and Area-Based Management Regimes, and the Domestic Legislation Ratification Will Require

Abstract

The BBNJ Agreement entered into force on 17 January 2026, and India, a signatory since 25 September 2024, remains outside it. This article argues that India should ratify early and legislate concurrently rather than sequentially, because the Agreement’s obligations attach to activities Indian public institutions are already conducting, because the parameters India most needs to shape are being fixed in the run-up to the first Conference of the Parties, and because the distance between the Agreement and current Indian law, though real, is narrow enough to be closed by a single focused implementing statute. Working doctrinally across the Agreement’s marine genetic resources, area-based management and environmental impact assessment chapters, the article maps each obligation against the Biological Diversity Act 2002 as amended in 2023, the Territorial Waters, Continental Shelf, Exclusive Economic Zone and Other Maritime Zones Act 1976, and the environmental clearance regime built under the Environment (Protection) Act 1986, and finds each instrument territorially confined in ways that cannot be cured by interpretation. Its contribution is architectural: it specifies the outbound notification duty, national focal point, benefit-sharing routing mechanism, flag-state enforcement power and assessment procedure that an Indian BBNJ implementation statute must contain, and shows why the familiar objection that a state should ratify only once it is ready inverts the actual sequencing risk.