India needs a law for protecting traditional remedies

India needs a law for protecting traditional remedies

Patent

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Intellectual property experts say that it is high time a private bill, the "Traditional Knowledge Act" -- moved in the Lok Sabha in 2016 -- is enacted into a law

India needs a law for protecting traditional knowledge acquired from our ancestors from being exploited by pharmaceutucal companies.

Intellectual property expertssay that it is high time a private bill, the "Traditional Knowledge Act" -- moved in the Lok Sabha in 2016 -- is enacted into a law.

P Sanjay Gandhi, president of Intellectual Property Rights Attorney Association (IPRAA) has written to speaker of Lok Sabha and chairman of Rajya Sabha requesting them to take necessary steps for enactment of the bill, a media outlet reported.

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India has succeeded in protecting about 2 lakh medicinal formulations from being exploited simply by creating creating a digital repository – Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). These include 36,000 Ayurveda formulations.

The TKDL was created with the help of an inter-disciplinary task force set up in 2001 by the department of AYUSH, formerly department of Indian system of medicine and homoeopathy.

TKDL, which contains 3.4 crore pages of information on 2,260,000 medicinal formulations in multiple languages, is designed to assist patent examiners of major IP offices across the world in carrying out prior searches before granting patents.