Old knowledge to get India money

India will be able to claim compensation for use of country's traditional knowledge to derive medicines by the developed world as per the new agreement approved by negotiators of over 190 countries in Japan on Friday night.

Updated on: Oct 31, 2010, 24:21:44 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan

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India will be able to claim compensation for use of country's traditional knowledge to derive medicines by the developed world as per the new agreement approved by negotiators of over 190 countries in Japan on Friday night.

The approval, to set up an International Regime on Access and Benefit Sharing of Genetic Resources, came on the last day of the convention on bio-diversity meet in Nagoya, Japan, result of over 20 years of negotiations and debate.

The treaty, a protocol to the main convention, lays down basic ground rules on how nations cooperate in obtaining genetic resources from animals to plants and fungi, said a statement issued by United Nations Environment Programme.

Environment minister Jairam Ramesh described the deal as a major achievement in the country's efforts to curb bio-piracy. India was first to announce that it will have green accounting system — to measure worth of India's forests and biodiversity — in place by 2011.

India has already established Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), where over 2,000 sources have been digitised to check patent of this knowledge in the western world. India has already thwarted moves to patent derivatives of tulsi (basil)and haldi (turmeric) in US and Europe.

Though TKDL only allows India to challenge patents, the new agreement will help in seeking compensation through a new global protocol. It will also promote research between rich and poor nations in use of plants and pathogens for development of medicine. “Indians will get money if its pathogens are used to derive medicines like the ones done for Avian flu,” Ramesh said.

The deal outlines how the benefits, arising for example when a plant's genetics are turned into a commercial product such as a pharmaceutical, are shared with the countries who have conserved that resource often for millennia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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