Lok Sabha passes Patents Bill

NEW DELHI: The Patents (Second) Amendment Bill 1999 was passed by the Lok Sabha today, incorporating all the changes suggested by the Select Committee. Since the Rajya Sabha had already passed the Bill on May 9 and referred it to the Lok Sabha, the path has been paved for the long awaited Patents Amendment Act 2002 which would align India’s legislation with the TRIPS Agreement without compromising national interests and ensuring easy availability of drugs at affordable prices. It also prevents traditional knowledge and life forms from being patented.
Minister of commerce and industry Murasoli Maran said as much at the end of the three-hour debate, adding that the Drug Controller had been empowered adequately to guard against exorbitant pricing. He stressed that the bill provides a wide-ranging and powerful weapon to the government to extinguish the patentees'' exclusive right immediately and acquire it if the occasion warranted. Mr Maran urged the domestic pharmaceutical industry to come out of its ‘’reverse-engineering mode’’ and move forward into the era of ‘’innovative R&D mode’’.
He pointed out that India was also emerging as the new leader of the knowledge-based drug industry.
Criticising the text of the TRIPS as a ‘’a masterpiece of ambiguity, couched in the language of diplomatic compromise, resulting in a verbal tight-rope walk, with a prose remarkably elastic and capable of being stretched all the way to Geneva,’’ Maran said that Bill with the help of the JPC, was designed to carve out a law without permitting any ambiguity.