Protection of India’s Traditional Knowledge

Traditional knowledge refers to the perennial practices that have been indigenously developed, evolved, preserved, and utilized over ages by local communities and may have high commercial value in particular medicinal effects which might be an effective cure for an ailment.

Although the discovery of medicinal products by bioprospecting is advantageous in several ways, the methods and applications adopted by pharmaceutical firms have been criticized at several forums.

In this regard, it a good reason for a country to go for protecting traditional knowledge of medicine from patenting by pharmaceutical companies just to gain a monopoly.

Consequences of Bioprospecting

• Pharmaceutical firms and biotechnology companies are exploiting biological riches and indigenous knowledge with the sole aim of developing patented products without recognition given to indigenous communities who selected, maintained and improved traditional plant varieties for medicine.
• Pharmaceutical firms are often accused of cheating local people by denying them access to knowledge, and financial benefits.
• In several cases, there is no regulation in place to ensure that the source countries of these plants will be adequately compensated.
• Imbalance in the ecosystem due to excessive exploitation of material resources is always a possibility. For example, tropical rainforest regions of the world, which constitute more than 50% of medicinal plants, are disappearing. This is mainly due to a multitude of commercial interests including bioprospecting.

Steps taken by Government of India

• Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) is a pioneering Indian initiative to prevent exploitation and to protect Indian traditional knowledge from wrongful patents mainly at International Patent Offices.
• Indian Patent Office has also brought out guidelines for processing patent applications relating to Traditional Knowledge and Biological Material to help the patent examiner to analyze what constitutes novelty and inventive step in Traditional Knowledge (TK) related invention.
• The Indian government has effectively licensed 200,000 local treatments as “public property” free for anyone to use but no one to sell as a “brand”.
• India has been trying to revive WTO talks to strengthen global norms to protect traditional knowledge from reckless patenting by corporate.
• Awareness creation among tribals about the provision of patenting traditional knowledge. Help is being provided to document their claims so as to oppose any such bioprospecting in the future.