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Unfortunately, India took a long time to put such a regime in place, allowing others to usurp the country's intellectual wealth through patenting abroad. The only course available to India has been to challenge each patent individually through prolonged and protracted litigation, which is a costly and time-consuming exercise. It is worth recalling that it took India almost 10 years of a costly legal battle to get the patent on Neem-based products quashed.
Similar were the cases with patents involving items like Basmati rice and turmeric.

However, regardless of past mistakes, leaving room for bio-plunder even today is untenable, especially after having already aligned the country's intellectual property rights (IPR) regime - with the TRIPs agreement and other international norms. India is also a signatory to the Convention on Bio-Diversity (CBD) and global conventions like UPOV (for plant variety protection), which allows sovereign rights to countries on their native knowledge and products, and provide for disclosure of origin in patenting procedures. Thus, it is absolutely essential for India now to do whatever is needed to plug the loopholes that allow traditional Indian Intellectual Property to be patented / protected abroad. Apart from promptly putting the database on traditional knowledge in the public domain, concrete action is needed to deal with IPR challenges. At the local level, the country needs IPR-savvy infrastructure for registration, regulation, arbitration and adjudication of matters relating to patents and other IPR issues. The urgency arises from the country emergency as the destination for bio-technology and pharmaceutical research and development, clinical trials and contract research and manufacturing. At the international level, India must intensify its crusade for bringing the provisions of the TRIPs accord closer to that of the CBD, to check bio-plunder from the developing countries. For that, the disclosure of origin clause should be incorporated in TRIPs to rule out patenting of traditional knowledge-based products in countries other than where they rightfully belong.

India continues to display a strange dichotomy with regard to protecting intellectual property rights. By now, there is probably consensus that, given the country's human resource strengths and its enormous potential in software,.music, entertainment, films, television content and publishing, stronger copyright protection is desirable. Perhaps because of this, enforcement of intellectual property rights is gradually improving. Nor is there great resistance to forms of intellectual property like geographical indications, trademarks and industrial designs.

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* Contributed by: -
Dr. R. P. Verma,
Ex. H.O.D. & Dean, Commerce and Business Management Dept.,
Arabinda Bhandari,
Strategic Management Researcher,
Ranchi University, Ranchi.