Monitoring and reporting plays a vital role in sustainable management of biodiversity. It provides better understanding of implementation progress as well as increased corporate accountability and transparency. IUCN designed the Biodiversity Indicator and Reporting System (BIRS) to guide companies in adopting a standard system for monitoring at their extraction sites and to encourage regular reporting on biodiversity attributes at company level.

IUCN has organized two workshops on BIRS at the Tata Steel mining sites, West Bokaro Coal Mine, Ramgarh, Jharkhand (27 February – 1 March 2017) and Noamundi Iron Ore mine, West Singhbhum, Jharkhand (23 - 25 March 2017). The objective of the workshops was to train relevant staff on the BIRS tool. The workshop involved classroom sessions on different steps of BIRS followed by the field survey of to assess habitats conditions in the mine lease. Mr. Vipul Sharma, Programme Officer, IUCN India was the resource person for the workshop.

The BIRS workshops were helpful in conveying the implementation of monitoring mechanisms, as well as effective in building the capacities of Tata Steel staff in habitat enhancements. IUCN will be organizing more workshops for Tata Steel in future to strengthen the company’s performance towards biodiversity conservation.