The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country’s traditional medicine in five languages - English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish - in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them.
 The tulsi (holy basil) plant has medicinal qualities |
The electronic encyclopaedia, which will be made available next year, will contain information on the traditional medicines, including exhaustive references, photographs of the plants and scans from the original texts.
Indian scientists say the country has been a victim of what they describe as "bio-piracy" for a long time.
"When we put out this encyclopaedia in the public domain, no one will be able to claim that these medicines or therapies are their inventions. Till now, we have not done the needful to protect our traditional wealth," says Ajay Dua, a senior bureaucrat in the federal commerce ministry.
Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who is leading the traditional wealth encyclopaedia project and heads India’s National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (Niscair), reckons that of the nearly 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin.
India has been embroiled in some high-profile patent litigation in the past decade - the government spent some $6m alone in fighting legal battles against the patenting of turmeric and neem-based medicines.
In 1995, the US Patent Office granted a patent on the wound-healing properties of turmeric.
Indian scientists protested and fought a two-year-long legal battle to get the patent revoked.
 India got a patent on turmeric, used in curries, revoked |
Last year, India won a 10-year-long battle at the European Patent Office against a patent granted on an anti-fungal product, derived from neem, by successfully arguing that the medicinal neem tree is part of traditional Indian knowledge.
In 1998 the US Patent Office granted patent to a local company for new strains of rice similar to basmati, which has been grown for centuries in the Himalayan foothills of north-west India and Pakistan and has become popular internationally. After a prolonged legal battle, the patent was revoked four years ago.
