The last decade has seen many bright rays of industrial and intellectual developments within Indian industry. The Sensex has been soaring to record levels leading to a great transformation of India's financial scenario. Therefore it is imperative that one of the fastest growing economies in Asia also feels the necessity to protect its precious IP leading to a doubling of the number of patent and copyright applications in the past two years.

India believed in the past that knowledge should not be private property, particularly knowledge for the public good. Therefore Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, an Indian physicist who pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, did not file patents for any of his discoveries in the beginning. Bose was not alone in his avowed reluctance to patent; Roentgen, Pierre Curie and many others also chose the path of no patenting on moral grounds. Due to this reluctance to patent on the part of Bose, India missed an opportunity.

India was alerted to commercial exploitation of its national heritage in 1995, when US companies were granted patents on the wound-healing properties of turmeric (US Patent No. 5401540), neem (EPO Patent No, 0436257) and basmati. India successfully challenged the grant of these patents. There was also outrage across the country when Monsanto wanted to patent cotton under the name BT cotton (a specialized, genetically engineered cotton variety resistant to the bollworm pest). The issue saw the suicide of many farmers.

The latest debate is on the patenting of yogic postures by a non-resident Indian in America who considers Yoga, which has existed in India for thousands of years and was first documented by Patanjali 5,000 years ago, as his invention. To date the USPTO has issued 134 patents on yoga accessories, 150 yoga-related copyrights and 2,315 yoga trade marks. Britain has approved at least 10 trade marks relating to yoga training aids that are mentioned in ancient texts. This was an eye opener to many Indians across the globe and also attracted the attention of policy makers in the Indian government.

In a move to fight back the government has formed a task force called the Indian Traditional Knowledge Protection Task Force headed by Vinod Gupta, an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) alumnus, and the founder of a leading IP school in one of the IITs in India. Researchers are documenting the ancient Ayurvedic system of medicine in a system called the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). This also covers other forms of traditional medicine including Unani and Siddha, and also yoga. The move is part of a larger project to document all sources of traditional Indian knowledge. The database contains details of thousands of herbal treatments drawn from age-old health systems. So far, 10 million of an estimated 30 million pages of texts in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian have been translated and entered into the digital library.

So what is the importance of patenting? Had Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, the first Indian to get a US Patent (No. 755840) in 1904, patented his discovery of radio and microwaves then the Indian telecoms industry would have been a pride like Microsoft is for the US! And now that this traditional wisdom is being used commercially, Asian countries such as India and China should rise to the occasion and protect their traditional and ancient knowledge forms to prevent its misuse and secure their very own IP.

Gladys Mirandah