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St. Mary's Convent High school, Mapusa is staging a play titled "Lion King"
December 1, 2007 - Hanuman Hall, Mapusa
to fundraise for a false ceiling for the school hall
& upgrading the school playground
Headmistress Sr. Namika A.C. / Teacher Mrs. Sonia Noronha
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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The battle for ayurveda: India is racing to record the details of its
traditional medicine
By Andrew Buncombe
Published: 23 November 2007
They range from the everyday to the decidedly obscure, from items with
a specific, specialised use to those with a host of applications.
Their common heritage is one of the world's oldest cultures, and their
details are being gathered together to guard against theft by the
West.
For several years the Indian authorities have been collating
information about hundreds of thousands of plants, cures, foods and
even yoga poses to create a vast digital database of traditional
knowledge dating back to up to 5,000 years ago, available in five
international languages. Now, the first part of that database -
relating to ayurveda or traditional Indian medicine - has been
completed and it is set to launch the fight back against what some
have termed "bio-colonialism".
"The ayurveda part has been completed," said Dr Vinod Gupta, the
chairman of India's National Institute for Science Communication and
Information Resources (Niscair), which is overseeing the project. "Now
we are negotiating an agreement with international patent offices [for
access to this database]."
The database, totalling more than 30 million pages and known as the
Traditional Knowledge Data Library, has come about for one very simple
reason: to prevent Western pharmaceutical giants and others using this
traditional Indian information to create a product for which they then
obtain a patent.
Interesting? Click here to explore further
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3187089.ece
