TKDL Traditional Knowledge Digital Library

TKDL, Traditional Knowledge Digital Library is a mammoth effort by indian goverment to save the bio-piracy battle. India home of ayurvedic, unani and siddha medicines and has history that traces back to more than 5,000 years ago.

These This knowledge has generally been passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. A part of this knowledge has been described in ancient classical and other literature, often inaccessible to the common man and even when accessible rarely understood. Documentation of this existing knowledge, available in public domain, on various traditional systems of medicine has become imperative to safeguard the sovereignty of this traditional knowledge and to protect it from being misappropriated in the form of patents on non-original innovations, and which has been a matter of national concern.

India fought successfully for the revocation of turmeric and basmati patents granted by United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and neem patent granted by European Patent Office (EPO). As a sequel to this, in 1999, the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy-(AYUSH),erstwhile Department of Indian System of Medicine and Homoeopathy(ISM&H) constituted an inter-disciplinary Task Force, for creating an approach paper on establishing a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).

The project TKDL involves documentation of the knowledge available in public domain on traditional knowledge from the existing literature related to Ayurveda, Unani,Siddha and Yoga, in digitized format in five international languages which are English, German, French, Japanese and Spanish.

Under normal circumstances, a patent application should always be rejected if there is prior existing knowledge about the product.But in most of the developed nations like United States, "prior existing knowledge" is only recognized if it is published in a journal or is available on a database - not if it has been passed down through generations of oral and folk traditions.

But now we have TKDL