What should India do when patents are granted to traditional knowledge components? We normally listen to the lament that our documentation of our traditional knowledge is poor, and hence we are losing out in the present age of patenting anything and everything.
India’s strategy on patents arising out of traditional knowledge has been flawed. It has been focusing on proving that we have documentation for our TK (Traditional Knowledge). Much of India’s own TK must necessarily be unrecorded. Even where records exist, they were meant not as a legally rigorous treatise, but as an aid to oral transmission. Digitisation of TK can only prevent granting of frivolous patents, which, even if left alone, can neither benefit the “inventor” nor harm India. Digitisation may in fact act as an aid to researchers eyeing Indian TK as a guide to focused lab work.
India’s approach towards TK should be proactive rather than defensive. Instead of acting as a documentation assistant for others, it should molecularise its own tradition in healthcare and benefit therefrom under the present patent regime. Most of TK resides in the third world countries and is largely undocumented. India should evolve a strategy that can be adopted by other countries as well. Instead of trying to convince petty U.S. officials that our TK is indeed documented, India should try to work towards evolving a world consensus on the patentability of results of lab research which uses TK as the starting point.
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