For those not familiar with the term Bio-Piracy - it is populary used to describe theft of therapies,medicines & medical inventions of a region/country by anothher country's companies & then getting them patented & claimign them to be tehir own discovery/finding.
Yesssss,recently I read about India being teh worst hit by Bio-Piracy.Many medical practices/systems liek ayurveda,Unani & Sidha which originated in India about 1000s of years ago are being passed off by other nations as their discoveries and correspondingly are patented. A few egs of teh same -
- In 1995, Us patent Ofice granted a patent on the wound healing property of turmeric.Indian scientists protested,fought a 2yr long legal battle and finally won it.
- Indian scientists won another battle against European Patent Office who patented an anti-fungal product derived from neem tree which already is a part of traditional indian knowledge.
India has mainly suffered because infon exists in huge books maily in sanskrit, which have never or hardly been read,translated or even published in any other language.Hence public has no clue about their existance.Ther are nearly 150000 recorded ayurvedic,unani,siddha medicines some 1500 asanas in yoga all origanting in India.
Now a project worth $2 million has been rolled out by Traditional Knowledge Digital Library which will bring out an encyclopedia of India's traditional medicines 7 hence stopping their piracy.😊
Enough of the boring facts.😆
Lets get to the real thing !
The debate lying here in :
Whose fault is it?or rather who is to balme fpor bio-piracy?
Indian's or the unaware patenting firms?
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