Patenting India

In the age of intellectual property rights, patenting our traditional knowledge is essential. Without patenting plagiarism will be rampant and it will affect the hard built wisdom of the age-old civilization. India has been a victim of soft pedaling patenting rights. The advanced nations with an eye on the patent rights and safeguarding its knowledge base have cleverly started patenting at an early age. As in other cases developing countries like India were dead slow in picking up patent rights. With the ball set rolling it should not stop in converting all its traditional knowledge sources into a digital form and steps must be taken to protect it from external possession and ownership.


ü India has lost over 15,000 patents of medicinal plants to the West
ü On an average, it takes 5 to 7 years to oppose a granted patent and costs between Rs 1 to 3 crores
ü Over 200,000 medical formulations have now been documented into India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL)
ü Creating TKDL took over 8 years and cost Rs 7 crore
ü The library will prevent those living abroad from claiming patent for existing formulations
ü Without the library India would have lost 2000 patents every year concerning Indian Systems of Medicine (ISM)
ü At any given time, 50 patent applications based on ISMS are awaiting grant of patient
ü The decision to create TKDL was taken after wrong patents were granted on wound-healing properties of turmeric (1995) at the United States and on anti-fungal properties of Neem granted at European Patent Office (EPO)
ü The patents were revoked in 1997 and 2005 respectively
ü In the past, patents have been granted at EPO on the use of over 285 Indian medicinal plants. These include Papaya, Indian long pepper, Kali Tulsi, pudina, ginger, aloe, Isabgol, Aamla, Jira, Soyabean, Tomato, Almond, Walnut and Methi.

Over two lakh medical formulations of Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani were documented by Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). This is an outcome of eight years of painstaking efforts by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and union health ministry’s department of Ayush. This collaborative effort has converted information of traditional Indian medicine from Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil to five international languages – English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish.

All efforts must be made to dig every possible information about traditional wisdom and it must immediately digitalized and patented. This will go a long way in putting Indian knowledge on the top of global top list.