The Legal Nuances of Traditional Knowledge Protection under the IPR Regime: A Critical Analysis

The protection for indigenous traditional knowledge in the Indian context is very crucial in the eye of the various infringements and challenges. In the Indian context the need to safeguard the traditional knowledge inclusive of the various traditional and indigenous practices contributing to the protection of the environment and the simultaneous protection of medicinal plants is two-fold. It involves the creation of a traditional knowledge bank that emphasizes on the use of plants in health care and identification of the medicinal plants. This includes also outlining their distributions and assessing their abundance so as to create a repository that can be beneficially accessed and protected under the IPR regime. The protection of the traditional and indigenous tribal knowledge through the various provisions of the Convention of Biodiversity (CBD) and the Nagoya protocol also aim to conserve populations of medicinal plant species in natural habitats and populations of medicinal plant species ex situ thereby building public support for the conservation of medicinal plants through communication and cooperation. The paper is an attempt to critically analyze the implementation of the available legislations and international protocols signed, the legal nuances in the direction of the protection of traditional knowledge under the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime in the Indian context and the effective measures that could be enforced and practiced to make the protection fruitful besides highlighting the challenges of the lack of awareness about medicinal plants and widespread deforestation of areas rich in biodiversity that pose an enormous threat. It is pertinent to mention here that in particular, many medicinal plants now stand on the brink of extinction because of development in tribal areas that have historically provided most of these precious resources.