Usha Sharma – Mumbai
On November 8, 2012 Controller General of Patents Designs and Trademarks (CGPDTM) issued draft guidelines for patenting traditional knowledge (TK) and biological material and asked for comments from the industry. In response, industry and academia are working on the draft and targeting to submit their views/suggestions to the Indian Patent Office before March 15, 2013.
Dr Gopakumar G Nair, Chief Executive Officer, Patent Gurukul said, “Two months ago, the patent office had circulated the draft guidelines and asked for comments related to granting of patents on TK and related and biological related applications. To discuss and prepare final representation before submitting it to the Indian Patent office, we organised a brainstorming session recently at Pravin Gandhi College of Law, Mumbai and came up with many different issues and suggestions which we will be including in our representations.”
“After the discussion we will be circulating our views to academia as well as to the industry and after receiving their comments, we will prepare the final representation. We aim to receive their views/ suggestions over the next 10-15 days and by mid March submit the final representation from our end,” Nair added.
It has been reported that the Indian Patent Office is granting patents on the use of TK of India, particularly relating to the Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha systems of medicine, etc and patents have been granted on inventions related to biological resources obtained from India without taking adequate care to observe the mandate of law. This is inspite of the fact that other international patent offices are denying/ objecting to the grant of such patents on the basis of prior art evidence retrieved from the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).
Dr DB Anantha Narayana, Chairman of Herbs and Herbal Products Committee of the Scientific Body of Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission said, “Innovation is a very important to promote investments in TK. Currently, investments in these areas are dismally low. If innovations which meet the inventive step criteria are not given protection under patent law, there will be further reduction in research and benefits to consumers as proposed in the draft guidelines. Hence, to address these issues, industry and academia came together and discussed various topics in the brainstorming session to identify the areas which need to changed in the guidelines.”
Highlighting the needs of having such sessions, Dr LR Dwivedi, Pravin Gandhi College of Law mentioned, “We are emphasising the importance of existing TK to enable its benefits to reach the masses through the patent system. To address these issues leading scientists, patents professionals and students of law felt that these guidelines are too strict and they came to the conclusion that these are protectionist and do not promote innovation in India.”
He stressed that the demand is not for patenting what is already known but what is invention through application of science and technology.
During the session, various topics were discussed and speakers emphasised that herbal medicines needs more research support from the Government.
