Father of Grassroots Innovation - Prof. Anil K Gupta

Professor Anil Kumar Gupta is a senior faculty at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad one of the best business schools in India. This is not his only identification; but his work shows he has multidimensional personality. He is the executive vice-chairman of NIF (National Innovation Foundation). He is the first person in India who initiated promotion of grass root innovators since 1989. Recently in an interview he speaks about cross-pollination work of grassroots innovations, ideas on globalization, technology commons and his experience with big industries as well as Government, which is published in The Wall Street Journal | India. By his persistent and dedicated work, now more than 120,000 grass root innovations and traditional knowledge practices are documented from all various fields such as agriculture, animal and human medicines, herbal drugs, mechanical devices, rural technologies from the informal and unorganized sector of rural and urban India.

NIF has been established under the Department of Science and technology, Government of India on 28^th February, 2000. The main aim is to provide scouting, documenting and scaling of sustainable innovations and helping innovators of the informal sector to get to market the products through incubation and business development. It helps in protecting Intellectual Property rights of Grass root innovators and documents various innovations and Traditional practices. It also helps in technology transfer of suitable technologies. 57 Technologies have been already licensed. Former President of India Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam has been a great supporter and guide to NIF since its inception. and highly appreciates Prof. A.K. Gupta’s efforts. It also holds rural innovation competition where best grass root innovations are awarded. Innovations and medicinal plant database in Multilanguage is maintained by NIF. Similarly, Honeybee network tries to connect whole India and also creates awareness about the importance of grassroots innovations in the development of the Nation. SRISTI and GIAN support NIF in all its activities.

India is really blessed having a son like Prof. Anil K. Gupta. He is a true role model to be followed by the youth of nation. His many ideologies such as respect to traditional practices as well as grass root innovations, belief in sustainable technologies etc match with that of the Father of Nation - Mahatma Gandhi. He works for India but his essence of work has spread globally.

Why does India need TKDL ? A word on our heritage

On 2nd February 2009, the Government of India signed an agreement with European Patent office (EPO) to access its Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).This is indeed a major step in India’s efforts towards its efforts for authenticating the tremendous wealth in this area.

The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) has been created by National Institute of Science communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR), a CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research). It contains 24 million pages of Traditional Knowledge search database that translated text from Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu and Tamil to English, German, French, Spanish and Japanese. These traditional knowledge data are taken from Ayurveda (India’s traditional medical treatment), Unani (a system believed to have to come to India via ancient Greece), Siddha (one of India’s oldest health therapies from the south) and Yoga (considered as traditional medicine). India through TKDL is capable of protecting nearly 203,800 medical formulations as “public property” free for any one to use but no one to sell as “brand”.

This creation of a database is an evolutionary step to protect our traditional knowledge as well as for enhancing the negotiating strength of India at international forum. It can prevent multinational companies from unfair practice of commercializing traditional treatments. Several reports over the past few years, suggest that about 285 medicinal plants have been granted patents and about 200 to 500 such patents are granted every year due to lack of access to the documented knowledge in the public domain. With the signing of this agreement EPO can use TKDL during prior art search for all its patent applications. It is expected that as an immediate outcome through this signing, at least 40 patent applications in Europe are likely to get rejected, which would have otherwise granted.

TKDL is a model for other countries to protect their traditional knowledge from misappropriation. This is the time; we can hope it is end of bio-piracy and grant of patent based on traditional knowledge.

TKDL is created mainly for the traditional medicine system of our country. Similarly efforts must be made to develop databases for various other traditional knowledge in the field of agriculture, biodiversity, biosources used for food preparation, handicrafts etc. Several Governmental and non-governmental agencies are undertaking projects to documenting the local traditional knowledge. Much hope lies in finding several new databases in more facets of traditional knowledge in future.