Jorhat, May 25: Geographical Indicator (GI) certification has become an urgent necessity for intrinsically local products like the Assamese gamosa, gahana (jewellery), Karanga knives, Assam silk and eri shawls, to avoid repeat of a Sualkuchi-like situation.

This was asserted by Dulal Choudhury, the man who was instrumental in getting a GI tag for muga, at an event organised by the North East Small Scale Industries Association at Mukti Jujaru Bhawan here last evening to sensitise people about intellectual property rights and patents.

Choudhury said achieving a place in Guinness World Records by weaving the longest gamosa would in no way help weavers of Assam if people of the state continued to buy gamosas woven in Chennai. “The white gamosa with red inlays is an identity of the people of Assam and is a part of every ceremony. Almost 40 per cent of the gamosas sold here are being made in south India. The day is not far when we will all be buying gamosas woven in places outside the state unless urgent steps are taken to get it a GI tag,” he said. He added that as the government was not interested in doing anything, it was upto the state’s people to take the initiative.

Choudhury has many firsts to his credit. He was first to discover that muga was a good ultraviolet filter and also got two patents for mechanised muga weaving and mechanised softening of the silk yarn. It was while he was testing the softening process, which requires muga yarn to be heated at high temperatures, he noticed that compared to other material, the silk yarn remained much cooler. On a hunch, he got the fabric tested in the Tezpur University physics department, where it was confirmed that an umbrella made of muga fabric filtered out almost 80 per cent of the UV rays it was exposed to.

Enlightening the audience about the GI certification application process, he said tags should be sought for the famed iron knives and daos made by the blacksmiths of Karanga in Jorhat, the mulberry silk of Assam, eri shawls and Assamese jewellery.

S.R. Payeng, deputy controller, MSME Development Institute, Guwahati, said though patents and intellectual property rights were old topics, these were new to this region, as awareness here was very low.

Madhurjya Thakur, assistant controller of patents and designs, patents office, Calcutta, said patent applications from the Northeast were less compared to other parts of the country.