Protecting Indian Traditional Knowledge As Intellectual Property

The importance of traditional knowledge of the indigenous communities is now known to the World. With this realised importance comes the need to protect this knowledge and to prevent its misappropriation. But the question is how?

In the past few years, ample amount of discussions and debates on the subject of protecting traditional knowledge as intellectual property, have been occurring at the WTO, Conference of Parties at the Convention on Biodiversity, etc. A few national governments in these discussions have embraced the view that traditional knowledge needs to be secured legitimately, and they have condemned the formal IPR framework in its available structure for not just neglecting to give satisfactory protection to traditional knowledge additionally for legitimizing its misappropriation.