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The draft Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policy is being vetted by an inter-ministerial group following which it will be sent to the Union Cabinet for approval, said Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
The minister added that India’s IPR laws are in line with the international TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement.
“There is no need for apprehensions (regarding India’s IPR laws) in any corner of the world,” Sitharaman said at a seminar on ‘Protecting Brands Abroad with the Madrid System’ organised by FICCI, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion.
She was partly alluding to concerns raised by the US on India’s IPR laws not being strong enough to provide adequate protection to all patent holders. In fact, the US has consistently placed India on its ‘IPR priority watch list’ (a list of countries with weak IPR regimes) for several years.
The draft policy, she said, focussed on stronger enforcement of IPR by increasing the manpower in IP offices and reducing pendency of IPR filings.
Most of the offices have done away with the manual interface as all applications, queries and decisions are made online, she added.
Think-tank Last year, the government had set up a think-tank headed by Justice Prabha Sridevan to highlight anomalies in the current IPR legislations and to advise on possible solutions. The new policy aims to bring clarity to existing laws and make changes wherever required.
The new policy, which incorporates views of stakeholders, including the US, is unlikely to make any changes on controversial laws such as Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act — a major demand of multinational pharmaceutical companies. Section 3(d) discourages patents being granted for incremental innovations.
Speaking on the recent Cabinet decision to have composite caps merging all forms of foreign investments, the minister told reporters that only two specific sub-caps remain, in defence and banking.
“In defence, the cap prevails for FPI (foreign portfolio investments) and in banking on FII (foreign institutional investments), because we don’t want fly-by-night operators or quick money coming and going. So, for those two specific cases, those two specific sub-caps remain,” the Commerce and Industry Minister said.
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