Universities should focus on traditional knowledge: Mashelkar

Taking lessons from international patent wars on traditional products like neem, haldi and basmati, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) director general R A Mashelkar has called for focus and documentation of indigenous knowledge systems in university education.

“Societies have generated knowledge not in formal laboratories, but in laboratories of life over centuries. To them, it was science, even if they did not use the terms,” Mashelkar said.

The third Indian engineer to have been elected as Fellow of Royal Society, London, confessed that science and technology practitioners had not shown enough respect for the long drawn empirical process by which people had gained knowledge about nature around them.

Stressing that it was time for university education to shift the search light on indigenous knowledge systems, the eminent chemical engineer said all societies had painstakingly acquired useful knowledge about their environment.

“While on a trip to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, I found an old woman who knows the use of close to 100 herbs for various types of ailments. When she dies, the repertoire of traditional knowledge will perish with her,” Mashelkar told a group of top academicians at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM). (PTI)