Alarmed by the growing number of instances of Western yoga gurus claiming copyrights to ancient “asanas”, the Government of India has decided to fight back.
The Union Health Ministry has assembled a team of 200 researchers from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) to put on record all known yoga postures and techniques in a comprehensive database called Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).
The Government of India hopes that future patent applications would be rejected on the basis of “prior art” from the information in the TKDL.
