The Government of India began to build on the work that the Honey Bee Network, SRISTI, and GIANs had started when it set up the National Innovation Fund (NIF) in 2000.<sup>110</sup> NIF is a formal effort to document and recognize grassroots innovations and traditional knowledge. Its home page, mission statement, and statements of goals tell an interesting story. Under the heading “Mandate,” NIF provides the following quotation:

[T]he time has come to unleash the creative potential of our scientists and innovators at grassroots level. Only then can we make India truly self-reliant and a leader in sustainable technologies...propose a national foundation for helping innovators all over the country. This fund will build a national register of innovations, mobilize intellectual property protection, set up incubators for converting into viable business opportunities and help in dissemination across the country.<sup>111</sup> NIF’s mission statement translates this mandate into “to help India become an inventive and creative society and a global leader in sustainable technologies without social and economic handicaps affecting evolution and diffusion of green grassroots innovations.”<sup>112</sup> Its Website then lists five goals and six objectives, all focused on the primary social goals of linking India’s informal to its formal sector—or more precisely, of formalizing the knowledge latent in “green grassroots innovation.” The only mention of anything capable of generating revenues lies in a single phrase, repeated in both the goals and objectives, of promoting “wider social awareness and possible commercial and non-commercial applications of innovations.”<sup>113</sup> Not surprisingly, discussions of its achievements—which are numerous and significant along several social dimensions—make little mention of revenue generation.

The Government of India has also undertaken a more concrete and ambitious project, the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).<sup>114</sup> The motivation for this project lay in a patent battle waged when the USPTO granted a patent to the University of Mississippi for the healing properties of turmeric, and a similar battle at the European Patent Office over a patent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture protecting the fungicidal properties of neem. Indian practitioners of traditional knowledge had long known of both herbal remedies. The Indian government contributed input to the U.S. and European reexamination processes, and the patent offices canceled both patents. The government then decided to build a computerized database of indigenous knowledge related to medicinal plants to prevent any future attempts at misappropriation through the various national patent systems. According to Secretary Dua, the current catalog reportedly stands at 130,000 items; projections suggest that it will reach 170,000 in the near future.

The government plans to make the entire TKDL available online to patent offices around the world to use as parts of their prior art searches. But the TKDL is a purely defensive measure. Its purpose is to eliminate patenting of traditional knowledge; as currently envisioned, it will neither

> 110 www.nifindia.org. 111 www.nifindia.org. 112 http://nifindia.or/mission_htm. 113 http://nifindia.or/mission_htm. 114

> www.niscair.res.in.

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