Bio-piracy targetted

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4506382.stm

This is an interesting article. It talks about how Indians are hitting back at the entire trend of ‘bio-piracy’ by putting out in public information about Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha medicine so that no other person/entity can claim credit for anything linked to these medicine systems. The case related to patenting of neem and turmeric is still fresh in public memory. It is good to know that there are dedicated people working on this project. Why be modest and shrug off credit? The world knows that yoga originated from India. Ayurveda is an ancient medical system that talks about healing and good health in place of disease control. Yes, it is more than 5000 years old and it came from India. Siddha medicine is a traditional branch of medicine dealing with metals and you know where it originated. Neem has been used for different medicinal purposes in India since centuries. Who is not familiar with haldi or turmeric? It adds the right colour and flavour to Indian food and also has various healing properties. Now all this information is being culled and collated to create a 30-million-page electronic encyclopaedia of India’s traditional medical knowledge, the first of its kind in the world. 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.

Mr. V K Gupta, the project director of this massive operation rues, “People outside India are not aware of our immense traditional knowledge wealth.”

However, what we need to realize is, this knowledge is for the entire world no matter where it originated.