From Registration to Recognition: A Doctrinal and Empirical Assessment of the Protection of Traditional Cultural Expressions in India after the WIPO GRATK Treaty, 2024

Abstract

India holds one of the world's most extensively documented reservoirs of traditional knowledge, yet no Indian statute defines or protects traditional cultural expressions (TCEs) as such. Existing scholarship makes the normative case for sui generis protection but offers little evidence of how India's current mechanisms actually perform. This paper asks whether India's statutory patchwork protects TCEs or only adjacent categories, and what its operating mechanisms reveal about the limits of product-based and codification-based protection. It combines doctrinal analysis of the Copyright Act 1957, the Geographical Indications Act 1999, the Biological Diversity Act 2002 and Section 3(p) of the Patents Act 1970 read with the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL); a comparison with Kenya, Peru and the Pacific Model Law; and a trend analysis of official TKDL and GI Registry data. It finds that each Indian instrument reaches a TCE only by converting it into something else: an authored work, a geographically linked product, a biological resource or a patent claim. TKDL evidence has defeated close to 370 patent applications, and annual GI filings rose from 58 in 2020-21 to 275 in 2024-25, yet neither mechanism protects performative, symbolic or non-commercial expressions, as the 2025 Prada–Kolhapuri chappal episode shows. The 2024 WIPO GRATK Treaty, confined to genetic resources, repeats this gap, and India has neither signed nor acceded to it. The paper concludes that the gap is structural and recommends a community-vested TCE statute, with consent rules distinguishing customary from non-customary use, community standing to sue, and accession to the Treaty.

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