Indian Government initiated the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) to prevent exploitation and to protect Indian traditional knowledge from wrongful patents mainly at International Patent Offices.

Earlier, India’s Traditional knowledge of Medicinal exists in regional languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil and are neither accessible nor comprehensible for patent examiners at the international patent offices. Thanks to digital library, TKDL now contains Indian traditional medicine knowledge available in public domain in a digitized format and is available in five international languages (English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese).

The minister of State for AYUSH, ShripadYesso Naik said that the TKDL prevented 220 wrongful patent filings and 12 patent offices have been provided access to TKDL database namely EPO,USPTO, JPO, GPO, Canadian Patent Office, Chile Patent Office, Australian Patent Office, CGPDTM (India), UK Patent Office, and Malaysian Patent Office, Rospatent (Russia) and Peru Patent Office.

Now India also brought out Guidelines for processing Patent Applications relating to Traditional Knowledge and Biological Material to help Patent examiners to analyze novelty and inventive step in Traditional Knowledge (TK) related invention.

The author is a Patent specialist from MR Technollect Solutions (www.MRTechnollect.com)