Official fumbles at IPR forum, envoy seeks remedy

NEW DELHI: Have Indian officials compromised at international fora the government’s actual position on intellectual property rights (IPR)?
It certainly has, going by a recent missive from India’s ambassador to the UN, HS Puri, to a few senior officials in New Delhi, including the commerce secretary, the HRD secretary and the special secretary in the ministry of external affairs.
And what’s at stake due to the misadventure of the bureaucracy is substantial — loss of national authority on grant of patents and subservience to an international patent granting surrogate.
A mere procedural reform in the Patent Co-operation Treaty (PCT) could well assume the unwarranted proportion of having to deal with substantive issues of patent appraisal and grant, under the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s (WIPO). The government should reiterate its policy of opposing upward harmonisation based on “permissive standards� of the developed countries, in particular, the US, Mr Puri warns in his letter to the senior officials.
What has particularly caused the UN ambassador’s concern was the U-turn by senior bureaucrat AE Ahmed, to support the WIPO director-general’s patent agenda when the issue came up for discussion at WIPO assembly late last year.

“It seems that Mr Ahmed is unhappy that we should have opposed the (WIPO) secretariat proposal of an “optional protocol� that would take the PCT into the arena of substantive patent issues,� Mr Puri said in the letter, which was addressed to secretary, industrial policy, Laxmi Chand, as well.
Mr Puri stressed that he was unaware of any change in India’s official position opposing any move to bring about upward global patent harmonisation, which had been voiced in the WTO in Geneva or in the Doha ministerial. Mr Ahmed’s own statement in ‘02 during the WIPO assembly underscored the government’s misgivings about the WIPO patent agenda.
When contacted, Mr Ahmed said he was unaware of any communication from India’s permanent mission in the US to New Delhi in the said matter. “I have no comments whatsoever to offer,� he said.
But, apart from a copy of Mr Puri’s letter, ET also has a copy of a “confidential� letter written concurrently by India’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, Debabrata Saha, to Mr Ahmed himself. Expressing surprise at the change of stand by Mr Ahmed at the WIPO assembly, Mr Saha said, “Optional instruments are anything but optional... in the real world of international agreements, there is no such thing as opt-in/opt-out flexibility.�
To drive home this point, Mr Saha cited the examples of other supposedly optional pacts such as Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Paris Convention and the Codes of Tokyo Round.

In course, all these became virtually obligatory. The stated objective of the technical changes sought in the PCT regulations as part of the procedural reform is to make the PCT system more “user-friendly�, which, Mr Saha points out, is an euphemism for “more permissive.�
According to Mr Puri, a large majority of developing country members of WIPO are clearly not equipped to resist pressure from the protagonists of upward harmonisation. Nor, perhaps, do they see much at stake for their own countries, given their limited capacity to contribute to, or draw from, the knowledge economy.
It is left to a few larger developing countries (such as India, China, Brazil and Egypt) therefore, to resist these efforts.