KEY POINTS:
They range from the everyday to the decidedly obscure, from items with a specific, specialised use to those with a host of applications. Their common heritage is one of the world's oldest cultures and their details are being gathered together to guard against theft by the West.
For several years, the Indian authorities have been collating information about hundreds of thousands of plants, cures, foods and even yoga poses to create a vast digital database of traditional knowledge dating back almost 5000 years, available in five international languages. Now, the first part of that database - relating to ayurveda or traditional Indian medicine - has been completed and is set to launch the fight back against what some have termed "bio-colonialism".
"The ayurveda part has been completed," said Dr Vinod Gupta, the chairman of India's National Institute for Science Communication and Information Resources, which is overseeing the project. "Now we are negotiating an agreement with international patent offices [for access to this database]."
The database, totalling more than 30 million pages and known as the Traditional Knowledge Data Library, has come about for one simple reason: to prevent Western pharmaceutical giants and others using this traditional Indian information to create a product for which they then obtain a patent.
The danger of such "misappropriation" is all too real. In 1994, an American company was granted a patent for a product based on the seeds of the need tree, used in India for centuries as an insecticide. It took the Indian authorities more than 10 years to have the patent overturned. Similar battles were fought over a product based on the spice turmeric as well as a Texan company's attempt to trademark its strain of rice as "Texmati".
"In 2000, we did a study of the US patent database. We found there were 4986 patents for products based on medicinal plants," said Dr Gupta. "Of those, around 80 per cent were based on plants from India ... 50 per cent of those patents should never have been given - there was no change to the traditional knowledge."
Under international guidelines, patents should not be given if it is shown there is "prior knowledge" or existing information about the product or item. In the United States, prior existing knowledge is only recognised if the information has been written down.
Unlike many cultures from which traditional information has been misappropriated, India has an extensive written tradition. But most of the writing was in languages not widely read in the West. To get around this challenge, Dr Gupta called in more than 100 practitioners to help compile the information using computer software.
The database is being made available in Japanese, English, German, French and Spanish and the contents will be made available to patent officials once agreements on protecting the information and preventing it from being passed to corporations, are reached.
- Independent
