Even as 2011-12 saw Union ministers going on an unprecedented number of foreign TRIPS, the MEA has refused clearance on several grounds for at least 39 proposed TRIPS by 25 Union ministers since June 2009. Some of them are no longer ministers. All these TRIPS, barring one, fell in the official category. The ministers had proposed to travel to destinations such as the US, UK, France, Italy, Japan, Australia and South Africa,...

India is coming under increasing pressure from the U.S. and the European Union for the strict patentability criteria it applies for medicines. AS was only to be expected, the two landmark decisions made by the Indian patent office in recent times concerning pharmaceutical patent cases have not gone down well with the multinational drug industry. First, there was the rejection in 2006 of the patent application by the Swiss multinational...

That this is the first time a compulsory licence has been granted in India is in itself important. INDIA'S long struggle to ensure access to affordable medicines for its people recently took a positive and interesting turn. In early March, just before he demitted office, Controller General of Patents P.H. Kurian passed an order on an application filed by Natco Pharma, headquartered in Hyderabad, requesting a licence to produce an anti-cancer...

PROFESSOR Shamnad Basheer joined the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata, in November 2008 as the first Ministry of Human Resource Development Chaired Professor in Intellectual Property Law. Before this, he was Frank H. Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the George Washington University law school and a research associate at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre (OIPRC).  He is the founder of several initiatives, including...

The implementation of Patents Act, as last amended in 2005, raises significant issues of immediate concern to patients across the world. INDIA'S Patents Act has an interesting history. Enacted first in 1911 as the Indian Patents and Designs Act in the colonial era, it primarily addressed the interests of inventors, who did not want their inventions infringed upon by anyone who copied them or adopted the methods used to make them....