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What happens when
spirit
meets wallet?
It's patently
obvious
By Siddharth
Srivastava
NEW DELHI - It is a US$30
billion-a-year business in America, with its roots
in India. Long before outsourcing became a dirty
word, India was being tapped by new-age gurus,
both Western and Indian, to impart to Americans
and Europeans the virtues of the ancient
traditions of yoga that teach the blending of
mind, body and soul.
It is estimated that
close to 20 million Americans practice yoga, with
the majority of fitness clubs offering
instruction. Retailers such as Wal-Mart and Rei
stock up on yoga accessories such as DVDs,
apparel, mats and other equipment. According to
reports, Nike is scheduled to launch its first
yoga shoe. The average yoga practitioner's annual
expenditure for enlightenment is estimated at
$1,500.
Well, where there is business
there are new rules and vested interests that
transcend the virtues of the exercise form.
Marketing of spirituality, irrespective of good or
bad karma, has caught on in the West. Western
followers are already familiar with the works of
Deepak Chopra, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar of the Art of
Living, and Bhagwan Rajneesh, who appealed to his
audience through a modern interpretation of
Buddhist philosophy.
India has its own
fears in the matter. It is the World Trade
Organization (WTO) regime of intellectual property
rights, trademarks, patents and copyrights that
threatens to infringe on an area that India
considers its own fief. India feels that it stands
to lose its traditional rights over yoga and
related ancient fields of study about medicine and
health and possible revenue streams, if it does
not act fast. Thus, India's Science and Technology
(S&T) ministry is pushing for a more thorough
patenting of the country's traditional knowledge
base to prevent future misuse and bio-piracy. Yoga
is one area that is being examined with
considerable zeal.
It may be recalled that
India raised quite an international furor when
America's Ricetec Inc was granted a patent for the
basmati variety of fragrant rice in 1997. The rice
had been grown for centuries in the Himalayan
foothills, and India has since won the patent
battle for basmati. Then, the US Patent Office
revoked the turmeric (a flowering plant in the
ginger family) patent on the basis of a complaint
by the New Delhi-based Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR). The patent had been
granted in March 1995 to two non-resident Indians.
As turmeric has been used for thousands of years
for healing wounds and rashes, the CSIR challenged
the patent on the grounds that it lacked novelty.
The US Patent Office upheld the objection and
cancelled the patent.
India has taken note
of future attempts at bio-piracy, which in a way
is similar to people booking Internet domain names
- "cyber-squatting". "We want to completely patent
our age-old methods and techniques to protect
them. We have to protect our traditions and our
database. India is filing for more and more
patents every day," says Science and Technology
Minister Kapil Sibal.
According to a press
statement by the S&T ministry, the government
is making a digital database of 1,500 yoga
postures and their therapeutic properties that can
be used to oust the 134 patents on yoga
accessories, 150 yoga-related copyrights and 2,315
yoga trademarks the US Patent Office has issued so
far.
This database, comprising
body-cleansing practices, breathing exercises,
yoga symbols called mudras, postures and
special practices such as floating in water, will
be digitally documented in five major
international languages so that it can be
networked to the main patent offices around the
world. The National Institute of Science
Communication and Information Resources, under the
aegis of the S&T ministry, is building the
nearly 10-million page digital database for the
Department of Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, Unani,
Sidha and Homoeopathy under the Health ministry.
The database will also help avoid expensive
litigation to undo rights already granted. To
reverse them, India has to move the World
Intellectual Property Organization.
India's Economic Times newspaper reports
that many rights have been secured by non-resident
Indians, such as Bikram Chowdhury. According to
the report, "Chowdhury used a copyright on his
book in which he described his sequence of yoga
postures to prevent others from teaching them,
although the postures themselves were not under
any form of protection. He got protection for a
sequence of 26 postures called asanas to be
performed at a particular atmospheric temperature.
While the postures are straight out of India's
tradition, the temperature requirement, the
ambience and accessories, such as the mat spread
on the floor, are his own, as justifications for
the protection, an official source said. The
Indian government now fears that someone may get
market monopoly for the Buddhist way of meditation
called vipassana and transcendental
meditation taught by the Maharshi Vedic
University. The government faces another problem,
with no easy solution in sight."
Many in
India feel that the country has already been on
the receiving end of the new international
intellectual property agreement (known as
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS), which many countries had to
forcible ink when nobody understood the
consequences of patents being pushed by
multinationals to protect their interests). It is
estimated to cost India's economy over $700
million each year, while creating only $57 million
in profits for multinationals. Of particular
interest has been the deleterious impact on the
Indian pharmaceutical industry.
It may be
recalled that last December India took the third
and final step (earlier amendments were in 1999
and 2002) in ending India's 35-year-old process
patent regime and changed over to a product
patent, as in Western countries. This was the
result of the 1995 WTO agreement of which TRIPS is
a part. The earlier system was designed to
encourage low-cost manufacturing of drugs,
developing the pharmaceutical industry and making
medicines widely available at low prices. Despite
the great success of this system, its end was
required by a WTO agreement demanding that all
countries (with some exceptions) switch to product
patents.
There is considerable criticism
against the new patent regime. One expert has been
quoted as saying, "The agreement on TRIPS
prescribes worldwide minimal standards for patent
protection. No country adopting a market economy
and keen to be integrated in the world economy can
do without WTO membership, and so has to swallow
the TRIPS pill as well. WTO/TRIPS stands for a
recolonization of the economically weak countries.
The patent right is an obstacle in the fight
against the AIDS epidemic. These economic rules of
the game are partly to blame for the fact that
people are dying."
However, the Indian
government is trying to ensure that India is able
to protect its interests when it comes to yoga,
which is of particular interest to the West. It is
expected that India's more than 4,000-year-old
yoga traditions may be up for grabs, leading to
several disputes in the near future. The systems
of yoga are based on the Hindu philosophy of
renunciation. But business is business.
Siddharth Srivastava is a New
Delhi-based journalist.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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