Open your grandmother’s medicine box and you will
invariably find it full of herbs or their parts: saunf, ajwain, pepper, haldi,
tulsi, Aloe, neem, and the list is endless. Strangely though, you will find
that many traditional recipes, for countering a plethora of illnesses, simply
work wonders. This knowledge has got passed down several generations only
because the unique herbal formulations for treating the human body have given
consistent results over the centuries. The ancient Indian wisdom of the usage
of thousands of medicinal plants, in unique combinations and definite doses, is
truly a blessing for keeping at bay the discomfort of many dreadful diseases.
The
sanctity of our traditional knowledge is well established for it is codified in
several classical ancient texts in the form of hundreds of thousands of
Sanskrit slokas that mention scores of unique formulations of various
herbs. This vedic knowledge – a handiwork of our sages and learned forefathers
– is a treasure trove of information that unfortunately remained accessible to
only a few experts, and long languished in the prison of ignorance of the
common masses. Besides, the tribal and indigenous communities have also for
long been the custodians of our country’s rich biodiversity. Nonetheless, this
enormous traditional wealth, collected over millennia with some of it codified
in a large number of old treatises of medicine, is a part of our rich legacy
and belongs to India.
In modern
times, with global resurgence of interest in herbal medicine, medicinal plants
and their products are not just the source of affordable healthcare with
minimal side effects, but are also important In terms of international trade
and commerce. Realizing the potential of earning huge profits, many
multinational pharmaceutical companies began to target the exploitation of
traditional knowledge related to medicinal plants. To stop this exploitation,
the need to protect the owners of traditional knowledge and provide them their
rightful dues stemmed. It thus became imperative to safeguard the IPR on
traditional knowledge.
A new era dawned when a US patent
granted for the wound-healing properties of turmeric was challenged
successfully by CSIR. In a landmark decision, the United States Patent and
Trademark Office (USPTO) revoked it after ascertaining the medicinal use of
turmeric in India for centuries. This opened the floodgates for successful
fights for the rights to neem and basmati rice, which firmly established the
need to document our precious traditional knowledge for shielding it from the
assault of wrongful grant of patents. Although these tough fights were won, a
lot of time and funds were invested. Cancellation of the patent for turmeric
took about two years while it took five years for revoking the patent on the
anti-fungal properties of neem.
It thus became clear that it is
possible to revoke the grant of wrong patents at international level and also
exposed the fact that relevant information on traditional knowledge was not
available to International patent examiners in a retrievable format. The need
to systematize the documentation of knowledge existing in the public domain, on
various traditional systems of medicine, thus assumed great significance for
preventing the misuse of this knowledge through non-original inventions.
While
considering the patentability of any subject matter, the patent examiners
search available resources for non-patent and patent literature. Although
patent literature is available in many databases that can be easily retrieved,
non-patent literature normally appeared scattered. Thus arose the challenge to
create non-patent literature databases, containing information on traditional
knowledge that was easily accessible.
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In
this endeavour, CSIR was on the forefront as a collaborative Project – the
Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) – was initiated between the
National Institute of Science Communication & Information Resources
(NISCAIR) and the Department of Indian System of the
Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy
(AYUSH), erstwhile Department of Indian System of Medicine and Homoeopathy
(ISM&H), Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. The MoU for this Project
was signed on June 6, 2001.
It all, however, started in June 1999
when the need for creating Traditional Knowledge databases was realized by
the Standing Committee on Information Technology (SCIT) of World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO), under the Chairmanship of Dr. R. A. Mashelkar,
the then Director General of CSIR, India. A few months later, an Approach
Paper on setting up of TKDL was prepared by Mr. V. K. Gupta, the then Senior
Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, the former Director,
NISCAIR. This paper was submitted to SCIT, WIPO the same year.
In January 2000, an inter-disciplinary Task Force on TKDL, consisting of experts from the then
Department of ISM&H, Central Council of Research in Ayurveda & Siddha
(CCRAS), Banaras Hindu University (BHU), National Informatics Centre (NIC),
and Controller General of Patents Designs & Trade Marks (CGPDTM) was set
up under the Chairmanship of Mr. V. K. Gupta. In January 2001, the Cabinet
Committee of Economic Affairs (CCEA’s) finally gave approval on the TKDL
Project – a triumph for the entire TKDL team.
Implemented at CSIR, the TKDL
Project comprises an inter-disciplinary team of Traditional Medicine
(Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Yoga) experts, patent examiners, IT experts,
scientists and technical officers. The focus of this Project has been to
create database on the codified traditional knowledge on Indian Systems of
Medicine. For example, for documenting knowledge in Ayurveda, the available
information in public domain was first searched, sifted and collated. The
coded information lying dormant in the Sanskrit slokas was understood
and converted into structured language using the specially created
Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification (TKRC) and saved in the
database by experts in the field. The saved information can be read in five
different languages (English, German, French, Japanese and Spanish) and is
simple to comprehend. The TKDL software is special for it does smart
translation, instead of mere transliteration, of Ayurvedic descriptions from
traditional terminology into modern terminology.
Several thousands of herbal
formulations from various Ayurvedic texts have been thus transcribed in
patent application format. Similarly, traditional knowledge available in
public domain, related to Unani, Siddha and Yoga, has also been converted to
the user-friendly digitized format that is easily understandable. This TKDL
database thus acts as a strong bridge between the traditional knowledge available
in public domain and the patent examiners in various patent offices.
In yet another
achievement in February 2002, about 200 subgroups on Traditional Knowledge on
medicinal plants were included against the existing few besides the linking
of TKRC to the international Patent Classification (IPC). Several specialized
subgroups were later included as the Project advanced. A demo CD containing a
sample of 500 formulations was released in October, 2003 by the then Hon’ble
Union Minister of Human Resource Development, Science & Technology, and
Ocean Development at NISCAIR. Three years later, in a landmark achievement,
the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs gave its approval on the access to
TKDL database to International Patent Offices.
In the year 2009
access to TKDL database was given first to the European Patent office, and
then to the Indian Patent Office (CGPDTM), German Patent and Trademark Office
(DPMA) and more recently to the USPTO (CSIR News, Vol. 59, 15 & 30
December 2009) under the respective TKDL Access Agreements. This allows the
various patent offices access to about two lakh medicinal formulations on
Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha, comprising a whopping 30 million pages! Following this, there have been innumerable
cases of withdrawal of patent applications, where the subject matter was not
considered to be original work due to TKDL prior art evidence. With a cost of about 1.18 crore,
the TKDL Project — a breakthrough that benefits the owners of traditional
knowledge from theft of their knowledge — is a classic example of integrating
the enormous capabilities of Information technology
for creating mechanisms of effective access and retrieval of the rich
traditional knowledge on medicinal plants collected over millennia, which in
addition, has opened up new possibilities for further research.
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