Save traditional knowledge

India has created an elaborate database of its traditional knowledge but, surprisingly, has not made it accessible to the patent offices in other countries, thus leaving room for bio-piracy through the patenting of Indian conventional products abroad. This defeats the very purpose for which the digital library on traditional knowledge was created at huge cost and involving the strenuous work of scanning through a mass of ancient literature. Had this database, containing exhaustive references, photographs of the plants and original texts, been in the public domain and available to patent offices around the world, no one would have been able to claim that these medicines, therapies or products were their inventions. Most patent offices recognise the information published in a journal or available on a database as prior existing knowledge, but not what is handed down over generations through oral and folk traditions""unless it is documented and made accessible.

Indeed, India had been a victim of bio-piracy for a long time, but its intensity has peaked after the signing of the Marrakesh agreement, particularly the component related to trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs). This required each country to protect its genetic resources and traditional knowledge through suitable patent legislation conforming to globally acceptable norms. Unfortunately, India took a long time to put such a regime in place, allowing others to usurp the country's intellectual wealth through patenting abroad. The only course available to India has been to challenge each patent individually through prolonged and protracted litigation, which is a costly and time-consuming exercise. It is worth recalling that it took India almost 10 years of a costly legal battle to get the patent on neem-based products quashed. Similar was the case with patents involving items like Basmati rice and turmeric.

However, regardless of past mistakes, leaving room for bio-plunder even today is untenable, especially after having already aligned the country's intellectual property rights (IPR) regime""read patent legislation""with the TRIPs agreement and other international norms. India is also a signatory to the Convention on Bio-diversity (CBD) and global conventions like UPOV (for plant variety protection), which allow sovereign rights to countries on their native knowledge and products, and provide for disclosure of origin in patenting procedures. Thus, it is absolutely essential for India now to do whatever is needed to plug the loopholes that allow traditional Indian intellectual property to be patent-protected abroad. Apart from promptly putting the database on traditional knowledge in the public domain, concrete action is needed to deal with IPR challenges. At the local level, the country needs IPR-savvy infrastructure for registration, regulation, arbitration and adjudication of matters relating to patents and other IPR issues. The urgency arises from the country emerging as the destination for bio-technology and pharmaceutical research and development, clinical trials and contract research and manufacturing. At the international level, India must intensify its crusade for bringing the provisions of the TRIPs accord closer to that of the CBD, to check bio-plunder from the developing countries. For that, the disclosure of origin clause should be incorporated in TRIPs to rule out patenting of traditional knowledge-based products in countries other than where they rightfully belong.