IP Law is a form of biopiracy, where South Asian culture is appropriated by the west and commercialized for development, deemed as inferior and invisible.

DIVERSITY AND PLURALISM are the characteristics of both the Indian environment as well as Indian society. We have a rich biodiversity oplants for food and medicine. Thus, agricultural diversity and diversity of medicinal plants have in turn given rise to a rich plurality of knowledge systems in agriculture and medicine. Philosophy and History of Science are revealing that preference of one system of knowledge over others is part of the constructed superiority of the colonizing West. Under colonial influence India’s biological and 1 intellectual heritage was devalued. The priorities of scientific development, and R&D efforts guided by a western bias, transformed the plurality of knowledge systems into a hierarchy of knowledge systems. Western industrial systems of knowledge in agriculture and medicine were defined as the only scientific system. Indigenous systems of knowledge were defined as inferior, and, in fact, as unscientific. Thus, instead of strengthening research on safe and sustainable plant-based pesticides such as neem and pongamia, we focused exclusively on the development and promotion of hazardous and non-sustainable chemical pesticides such as DDT and Sevin. The use of DDT causes millions of deaths each year and has increased the occurrence of pests 12,000-fold. The manufacturing of Sevin at the Union Carbide Plant in Bhopal led to a disaster which killed thousands and disabled more than 400,000 people. As recognition of the ecological failure of the chemical route to pest control increases, the use of plant-based pesticides is becoming increasingly popular in the industrialized world. Corporations that have promoted the use of chemicals are now looking for biological options. That is why, in the search for new markets and control over the biodiversity base for the production of biopesticides and chemicals, TNCs like W.R. Grace claimed IPRs on neem-based biopesticides. The experience with agrichemicals was replicated in the field of drugs and medicines. Indigenous systems of medicine and the biodiversity of medicinal plants were totally neglected in our scientific research and health policy which focused exclusively on the western allopathic system as well as on technology transfer from the western pharmaceutical industry. Thus, the health and pharmaceutical budget was heavily weighted in favor of the development and dissemination of the western allopathic system. In spite of a lack of official support, indigenous medical systems are based on over 7,000 species of medicinal plants and on 15,000 medicines of herbal formulations in different systems. The Ayurvedic texts refer to 1,400 plants, Unani texts to 342, Siddha system to 328. Homeopathy uses 570 plants of which approximately 100 are of Indian origin. Needless to say, the economic value of medicinal plants to 100 million rural households is simply immeasurable. The failures and non-sustainability of the chemical route to agriculture and health care provides an opportunity to re-evaluate knowledge systems and move from the false hierarchy of these systems to a plurality. Such a pluralistic view of knowledge systems would imply respect for the different systems in their own logic and in their own epistemological foundations. It would also mean that one system (viz., the western) does not have to serve as the measure of scientific adequacy for all systems, and further, diverse systems would no longer be reduced to the language and logic of the western knowledge system. The integrity of our biological intellectual heritage has to be respected and preserved. The assumption of hierarchy is also the underlying basis for legitimizing piracy as invention. Western bias enters the IPR regimes and superimposes the diversity of knowledge systems which leads to appropriation of traditional knowledge, i.e., biopiracy, and is presented as ‘innovation’ and ‘invention’. This phenomenon of biopiracy and intellectual piracy is one in which western commercial interests unethically and falsely claim products and innovations directly derived from indigenous knowledge traditions as their own ‘intellectual property’, a claim protected through ‘intellectual property rights’. This is a direct consequence of the devaluation and the resulting invisibility of indigenous systems of knowledge which in turn leads to lack of protection for these systems. This devaluation is linked to the imposition of the reductionist methods of western science to the non-reductionist approaches of indigenous knowledge systems. Therefore, as the western style IPR systems are biased towards western knowledge systems which reduce biodiversity to its chemical or genetic structures, the indigenous systems receive no protection while the piracy of these systems remains protected. In the absence of a protection system for biodiversity and indigenous knowledge systems, and with the universalization of western style IPR regimes, such intellectual and biological piracy will only grow. Protecting our biological and intellectual heritage in the age of biopiracy requires the recognition and rejuvenation of our heritage, and the evolution of legal systems for the protection of this heritage in the context of emerging IPR regimes.