India patents yoga poses from Western thefts

India is all set to grab the so called rights from patent parties in America and Britain who claim some of the ancient Yoga poses from its treasury of tradition and heritage as their own invention. India has geared up to put an end to the theft of its traditional knowledge by identifying the asanas or the Yoga postures from its scriptures and registering each one of them with the help of Yoga Gurus. Some of the schools that have tried to patent traditional yoga poses in specific sequences include Bhikram Yoga.

As of now the mission has stretched itself by adding about 600 asanas to ‘India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library‘ to curb the ‘Yoga theft’ by the so called gurus in the Europe and the United States patenting the ancient established their own according to ‘The Telegraph.’.

Yoga has become a 225 billion dollar industry now since its introduction to the west in the 1960s and 1970s when it was popularised by Beatles Guitarist George Harrison and others.

In India, however, it is still a collective knowledge normally practiced in public parks where Yoga gurus often teach breathing exercises called Pranayama , and the sequence of asanas that form the integral part of Surya Namaskar or Sun salutation, free of cost.

However in Western countries, especially in America, the number of the so called yoga teachers have grown increasingly with patent application stamping each pose as their own and not a part of the ancient Indian discipline.

The United States alone has 130 yoga-related patents, 150 copyrights and 2,300 trademarks.

The ‘Traditional Knowledge Digital Library’ of India is now being exposed to patents offices across the world to check whether the claim is a genuine innovation or belonging to the Indian traditional systems of medicine.

So far a team of learned Yoga Gurus from nine acclaimed schools have joined with the government officials and 200 scientists from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) to scan 35 ancient texts including the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita, and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras to register each pose that rightfully belonged to India.