Indian Scientist Shares Patent Millions with Tribal Community

A tired scientist walking through Kerala's Agastya hills noticed something remarkable in 1987. While he and his colleagues struggled with exhaustion, their young Kani tribal guides showed no fatigue at all.

Palpu Pushpangadan, an ethnobotanist documenting regional biodiversity, asked the guides their secret. After building trust over several days, they shared that they chewed berries from a forest plant they called "arogyapachcha," meaning "source of evergreen health."

Pushpangadan tried the berries himself and felt genuinely rejuvenated. He identified the plant as Trichopus zeylanicus travancoricus and took samples for scientific analysis, discovering compounds with immune-boosting and anti-fatigue properties.

By 1994, his research team developed Jeevani, a health tonic based partly on the plant's leaves combined with Ayurvedic knowledge. When they licensed the formula to a pharmaceutical company in 1996 for about $25,000 plus royalties, Pushpangadan made a groundbreaking decision.

He insisted that half of all payments go directly to the Kani community. The research institute set up the Kerala Kani Samudaya Kshema Trust in 1997 to manage these funds, creating one of the world's first formal benefit-sharing arrangements between scientists and indigenous people.

Importantly, Pushpangadan had already hired two of the original Kani guides as paid consultants during the research process from 1993 to 1998. This acknowledged them as active participants, not just invisible sources of information.

The Ripple Effect

The timing couldn't have been more perfect. The Convention on Biological Diversity had just been adopted in 1992, calling for fair sharing of benefits from indigenous knowledge, but nobody knew how to make it work in practice.

Pushpangadan's arrangement became the real-world proof that benefit-sharing was possible. Countries in the Global South pointed to the Kani case when negotiating international agreements, showing that structured partnerships could succeed despite complexity.

His model influenced later policies including India's Biological Diversity Act of 2002 and international protocols on genetic resources. Before governments created frameworks, one scientist showed the path forward by simply doing what felt right.

The arrangement wasn't perfect. Questions arose about whether the trust represented all Kani people fairly, and challenges emerged over time. But Pushpangadan demonstrated that indigenous communities could be genuine partners in scientific advancement, not just sources to extract knowledge from.

His legacy lives in every benefit-sharing agreement that followed, proving that progress and equity don't have to be separate goals.