The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is translating India's age-old traditional system of medicines into six foreign languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. Once translated they will be linked to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) portal in Geneva in order to document the traditional knowledge of Ayurveda.
Dr V K Gupta, Director, CSIR, said at the two-day international conference on Innovation & International Property Rights (IPR) Strategy in Hyderabad that there were 35,000 medicines, which needed to be translated. He said the translation work on 22,000 medicines was over and the remaining would be completed by December 2002.
Dr Gupta said the job was laborious as most of the medicinal plants and herbs were found mostly in India and to find a suitable nomenclature for the Indian names was difficult.
He said once the medicines were registered with WIPO, together with the translation, no other country would be able to claim patent rights on those medicines. We already have the shocking experience on Turmeric, Basmati rice and Neem for which others have claimed patent rights. Though the cases involving Turmeric and Basmati rice were resolved in favour of India, the patent right on Neem is still being disputed.
Francis Gurry, Assistant Director-General and Legal Counsel, WIPO, said the translation work was designed so as to create a better interface between traditional knowledge and patent systems. India, he said, had already linked to databases on Ayurveda to the WIPO portal, which illustrated different approaches and stages of traditional knowledge documentation and database development.
This decision was taken so that patents would not be granted for inventions that exist in traditional knowledge systems. "All inventions applying for patents should be novel, innovative and non-obvious and what has been passed by word of mouth and through ancestors cannot be patented," Gurry said.
Meanwhile there was disturbing news from the UK where the health authorities had classified Ayurvedic products as part of ethnic drugs. As per the new regulations in the UK, Ayurvedic products had been placed in the category of herbal drugs, which restricted recognition to only a few Ayurvedic drugs presently being marketed in Britain by a few companies and excluded more than 600 traditional Ayurvedic formulations.
Following last month's order, only 10 to 20 Ayurvedic drugs from the entire Ayurveda Pharmacopeia would get approval to use in the UK.
Expressing serious concern over the manner in which the issue relating to registering and regulating Ayurvedic medicines had been handled, All-India Ayurveda Medicines Manufacturers Association (AIAMMA) general secretary Pradeep Multani said, "It could affect India not only commercially but also in the loss of heritage and value." He asked the UK government and the European Union Commission to treat Ayurveda medicines differently from ethnic and other herbal medicines.