The well known successful case studies of revocation of Turmeric and Basmati patents, granted by United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Neem patent granted by European Patent Office (EPO) are the milestones in the path of preservation of the Indian Traditional knowledge.
In order to fulfill the commitment in 1999, the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy-(AYUSH), erstwhile Department of Indian System of Medicine and Homoeopathy (ISM&H) constituted an inter-disciplinary Task Force, to create an approach paper on establishing a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).
The project TKDL started in the year 2001. TKDL provides a database containing information on traditional knowledge existing in the country, in languages and format understandable by patent examiners at International Patent Offices (IPOs), in order to prevent the grant of wrong patents. TKDL is a collaborative project between Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Ministry of Science and Technology and Department of AYUSH, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and is being implemented at CSIR.
The project TKDL constitutes documentation of the traditional knowledge available in public domain in the form of existing literature related to Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Yoga, in digitized format in five international languages which are English, German, French, Japanese and Spanish. Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification (TKRC), an innovative structured classification system for the purpose of systematic arrangement, dissemination and retrieval has been evolved for about 25,000 subgroups against few subgroups that was available in earlier version of the International Patent Classification (IPC), related to medicinal plants, minerals, animal resources, effects and diseases, methods of preparations, mode of administration, etc.