India will not allow evergreening of patents: Piyush Goyal
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Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Saturday said India will not allow "evergreening" of patents.He said that India has a robust intellectual property rights (IPR) chapter in both the free trade agreements with the UK and the four-nation block EFTA."We will not allow any ever greening", and despite that "we still have a robust IPR chapter with two of the toughest countries of the world in IPR - Switzerland and the UK", he told reporters here.Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act, 1970, restricts patents for already-known drugs unless the new claims are superior in terms of efficacy, while Section 3(b) bars patents for products that are against public interest and do not demonstrate enhanced efficacy over existing products.Certain multinational firms have asked India to amend these laws, which were strongly opposed.Ever-greening of patent rights is a strategy allegedly adopted by the innovators having patent rights over products to renew them by bringing in some minor changes, such as adding new mixtures or formulations. It is done when their patent is about to expire. A patent on the new form would have given the innovator company a 20-year monopoly on the drug.Pharma firms from countries, including Switzerland and the UK, are demanding evergreening of patents The IPR chapter in these agreements is "a big signal that India is emerging out of the shadows and sitting on a high table with developed countries", Goyal said.Talking about collaboration in the critical minerals sector with the UK, he said India and the UK both have concerns and common interests in this area after the ban imposed by (China) on rare earth permanent magnets."The whole world has woken up to the reality that concentration of certain geographies in their supply chains can be harmful, and can suffer consequences in case of any unilateral action. Therefore, India and the UK are now looking to work together both for collaborating on the processing and refining of minerals and making finished products together," he said.
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The Hindu
29 minutes ago
- The Hindu
What has been missed is India's digital sovereignty
The India-United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement (FTA), called the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), has been lauded by the Union Commerce and Industry Minister, Piyush Goyal, as the 'gold standard' for all India's trade deals. Mr. Goyal has asserted that no compromise was made in any sensitive sector. Evidently, the Minister seemed to be counting only agriculture and labour-intensive manufacturing as sensitive sectors — which they are. But remarkably, despite the wide coverage the FTA has received, the impact on India's other, highly sensitive digital sector, which permeates every sphere of national activity and holds the key to our future, has gone without official comment or media scrutiny. We argue that the compromises made in the digital sector through the India-U.K. FTA have profound consequences for India's digital sovereignty — a term frequently invoked in high-level political discourse. India has completely flipped on several core positions that it has long maintained at global forums, including at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Source code disclosure The most surprising giveaway is on India's sovereign right to seek ex ante access to the source code for foreign digital goods or services, even for those deemed sensitive. This is very different from getting source code ex post for a specific investigation or remedy, which is allowed under the agreement. Regulators in different sectors often have strict disclosure rules, such as for food and medicine ingredients. Software now permeates nearly every product, including telecom, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and health applications, whereby it may be crucial for the regulators to be able to 'look under the hood' of software, for safety, security and general compliance requirements, and to enable urgent, real-time upgrades. Giving up this right is a 180-degree turn from India's steadfast stand at the WTO and other forums. Even the United States, which first included source code related prohibitions in its FTAs and at the WTO, withdrew this formulation last year, recognising its domestic regulatory, law enforcement and security imperatives. In the U.S. driven Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the 'source code disclosure' provision applied only to mass-market software such as Microsoft's operating systems — meaning not to niche and custom-made software. It specifically excluded software for critical infrastructure. In the U.K. FTA text, the prohibition applies to all software. Businesses are always free to enter, or avoid, transactions requiring disclosure of source code. What is sacrificed here are India's regulatory rights in this regard, for all times to come, in a sector that has just begun to take shape. 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Facilitating foreign access to such data poses risks of eroding India's competitive advantage in using India's own data to create Indian AI products, and also serious security risks as national data can be weaponised. The most contested issues in digital trade are the 'free flow of data' and 'data localisation'. While India seems to have largely stood its ground on these issues, its commitment to 'enter into consultations to extend appropriate equivalent disciplines' to the U.K. if India agrees to any concessions with another country, denotes a dangerous regress, and visible vulnerability, with regard to India's long-held positions on these key issues. This matter links to the one above on India's data being an important national economic resource as well as the need to safeguard it from a security point of view. Again, last year, owing to similar considerations, the U.S., the original proponent of 'free flow of data' and 'prohibition on data localisation', withdrew from these stances at the WTO. It is difficult to understand how Indian negotiators could be so naive or negligent in agreeing to the above concessions. Digital trade concessions are not like those on commodities, where tariffs can be applied one day and removed on another. Digital trade texts are essentially about rule making for a new global digital order. We either fully opt into western, Big Tech-oriented, digital architectures, or we maintain sufficient autonomy and sovereignty. This is because once the digital rules and systems are set, they are almost impossible to roll back. India's digital concessions are thus buttressing a set of rules for a global digital ecosystem from which India cannot extricate itself later. And India is doing all this in a reactive mode without a clear road map of its own. 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an hour ago
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Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
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