India Moves to Protect Yogas From Foreign Patents

Falgun Shuddha Panchami

New Delhi: India has licensed 200,000 local treatments, almost all ayurvedic, as “public property,” free for anyone to use–thus becoming the first developing country to prevent multinational companies from patenting traditional remedies and selling them as a “brand.”

Concerned about increasing levels of “bio-prospecting,” investigators found that least 5,000 patents have been issued to date. “More than 2,000 of these belong to the Indian systems of medicine,” says Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta. “Traditional medicine could herald a new age of cheap drugs, therefore the interest.”

Gupta is head of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, which lists 200,000 traditional Indian treatments in encyclopedic detail. That databasewill now be used by the European Patent Office to check against “bio-prospectors.” Officials say that to lift patents from medicines created from turmeric and neem, an Indian tree, it spent more than $5m. In the case of the neem patent, the legal battle took almost 10 years.

Yoga, too, is considered a traditional medicine and one that is already a billion-dollar industry in the US. Even asanas (yogic poses) are being patented by foreigners. “We want no one to appropriate the yoga brand for themselves. There are 1,500 asanas given in our ancient texts. We are transcribing these so they too cannot be appropriated by anyone.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

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