As per the information provided by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Traditional Knowledge Digital Library(TKDL) consists of 2.93 lakh medicinal formulations of Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha available in public domain, in five international languages namely English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish.
Work on TKDL-Yoga is under progress.
10 International Access Agreements on TKDL have been concluded with United States Patent & Trademark Office, European Patent Office, Canada Patent Office, Germany Patent Office, Japan Patent Office, United Kingdom Patent Office, Australia Patent Office, Malaysia Patent Office, and Chile Patent Office including Indian Patent Office.
As per the information provided by CSIR, Russian Patent Office (ROSPAT) has approached the Government of India for entering into TKDL Access Agreement. The negotiations are in advance stage.
The Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP), informed that a proposal has been moved for signing Access Agreement with World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to include the TKDL under Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) Minimum Documentation to prevent the misappropriation of Traditional Knowledge through wrongful grant of patents in other countries.
At present TKDL is only available to International Patent Offices under non-disclosure access agreement. Therefore, Digital India Programme does not have impact on TKDL progress at present.
What is TKDL?
It is a database with a tool to understand the codified knowledge existing for the Indian Systems of Medicine including Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani and Yoga as prior art.
It is not a diagnostic or usage database. TKDL is also not the prior art in itself; the Books on Indian Systems of Medicine are the prior art which act as the source of information for TKDL.
However, TKDL contains the scanned images of medicinal formulations from the original books.
TKDL covers over two lakh formulations which have been taken from Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Yoga texts. It is pertinent to note that TKDL does not contain the entire information existing in the Indian Systems of Medicine.
Rather than comprehensive, TKDL is a dynamic database, where formulations will be continuously added and continuously updated according to the inputs from the users of the database.
The information on traditional medicines appears in a standard format in TKDL. For example, formulations on Indian Systems of Medicine appear in the form of a text, which comprises the following main components:
• Name of the drug
• Origin of the knowledge
• Constituents of the drug with their parts used and their quantity
• Method of preparation of the drug and usage of the drugs
• Bibliographic details
TKDL, gives modern names to plants (e.g., Curcuma longa for Turmeric), diseases (e.g., fever for jwar), or processes, mentioned in the literature related to Indian Systems of Medicine, and establishes relationship between traditional knowledge and modern knowledge.
