In a development marking the global market potential of Indian grassroots innovations, a foot-pedal sprayer pump has been patented in the United States and its technology transferred to a US company.

M-Cam.com, a large patent data base US company, mediated the transfer keeping Indian rights of the technology intact, Science and Technology Minister Murli Manohar Joshi told a meeting of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee of the ministry.

The National Innovation Foundation played a key role in the international technology transfer, Joshi said, adding that it showed that Indian grassroots innovations have global market potential.

The NIF has selected 13,000 grassroots innovations based on traditional knowledge for commercialisation, an official release said quoting Joshi.

Joshi said 20 US patents have been filed on discoveries based on traditional knowledge.

Efforts are on to patent in 40 countries a sophisticated fingerprinting technique -- HPLC-UV -- which has been developed by the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad, he said.

The government also proposed to collect data on clinical trials and toxicology of 500 most widely used plants in Ayurveda, while under the new drug discovery programme, the extracts (both plant-based and microbial) as well as single molecules have been bio-evaluated for various diseases, Joshi said.

Tests revealed that the therapeutic activities of these were found to be much superior to well-accepted drugs in the market.

Promising leads have been obtained for 19 diseases including cancer, tuberculosis, malaria, hypertension, ulcer, dementia and Parkinson's, he said.

Joshi said that the country's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library has been accepted as a model format for patent requirements by many countries.

While TKDL has documented 36,000 ayurvedic texts in five international languages, while work on Siddha, Unani and Yoga is in various stages of progress. It has also identified 1,274 medicinal plants.