Press Release, Government of India
INDIA, August 12, 2011 (Press Release, Government of India): As of 2005, about 2000 patents based on India’s traditional systems of medicine were being granted to private corporations every year by the United States, Europe, Germany, Canada and other countries. Each such patent gave the applicant exclusive rights on the use of the technology in that country. This misappropriation of India’s intellectual property could occur only because the patent examiners could neither access the texts recording India’s traditional medicinal knowledge nor understand the languages in which they were written.
Now, with the help of modern information tools, India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) has converted the traditional medical knowledge of Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Yoga from 34 million pages of ancient texts, written in languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil, into five international languages, namely, English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish.
Under a non-disclosure agreement, TKDL access has been given to eight International Patent Offices: European Patent Office, Indian Patent Office, German Patent Office, United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office, United States Patent & Trademark Office, Canadian Intellectual Property Office, IP Australia and Japan Patent Office.
So far, 53 patent applications made by pharma companies of such countries have been either set aside, withdrawn/cancelled or declared as dead patent applications based on the information present in the TKDL database. These applications have been stopped at no cost and in few weeks’ time after filing of third-party observations. Once a patent has been issued, cancellation has been known to take 4-13 years of legal battle.
Considering TKDL’s novelty, utility and effectiveness in preventing the grant of wrong patents, several countries and organizations have expressed their keenness in replicating the model for their own countries.
TKDL is a collaborative venture between Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Ministry of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, and Department of AYUSH, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Today, TKDL is capable of protecting medicinal formulations.