India has documented a large part of its traditional knowledge in the form of TKDL with a view to prevent piracy. Agreements are signed with major patent offices in the world to give access to the TKDL so that it can be used to find out whether a prior art exists before a patent right is granted to the applicant. The agreement provides that the content of the TKDL will not be disclosed to any party.

India has signed such agreements with European Patent Office, (EPO), United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), German Patent Office (GPO), United Kingdom Patent Office (UKPTO), Australian Intellectual Property Office (AIPO) and Indian Patent Office (IPO).

“It was slated that such an agreement would be signed with the Japan Patent Office on March 25, this year, but it would not be possible as that country is severely affected by the recent tsunami and subsequent nuclear explosion. The signing of the agreement will have to be deferred,” said the Union minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, Pawan Kumar Bansal, while inaugurating the international conference on Utilisation of TKDL as a Model for the Protection of Traditional Knowledge in New Delhi on Tuesday.

Negotiations were underway to conclude a similar agreement with the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, he said.

The Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India (CSIR), Prof Samir K Brahmachari said ; “we are planning to seek approval of the government to allow at least one per cent of the TKDL medicinal formulations for open innovation model of research for developing life saving drugs and medicines for critical diseases like cancer, tuberculosis. Agreements should be signed with parties so that they do not claim any patent rights for their innovations and drugs are delivered at affordable prices.”
At present the TKDL contents are not disclosed to any third party to prevent its misuse.

TKDL is a collaborative project between CSIR and the department of AYUSH (traditional systems of medicines). It has so far documented traditional knowledge from 321 traditional texts related to Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Yoga in digitalized format in five international languages like English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese. TKDL database has been created for 226,000 medicinal formulations and the database size is of 34 million A4 size pages.

The TKDL Director, VK Gupta said : “Since 2009, on basis of our documentation at TKDL, we have objected to 600 patent rights accorded by various patent offices, out of which 215 are accorded by EPO. The accorded patent rights were reviewed in most cases and subsequently withdrawn.”

The WIPO Deputy Director General, Johannes Christian Wichard lauded India’s efforted in setting up of the TKDL with a view to prevent piracy. He said that in last year in Geneva, WIPO’s 184 member states made a historic breakthrough by agreeing to begin work on text-based negotiations to ensure effective protection of traditional knowledge.

These negotiations are now moving ahead in WIPO’s Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) The IGC will summit draft texts of the international legal instruments to the WIPO General Assembly in September, this year. The Assembly will then decide the future course of action

The three-day international conference on TKDL is being attended by representatives from 35 countries. Most of them have shown interest in India’s TKDL model.