Intellectual Property Rights Issues in Indian Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract

Historically, India has neglected, and even made a farce of, pharmaceutical patents.  In fact, it was not until 2005 that India offered patent protections for pharmaceutical companies at all.  This has led to abuses of the compulsory licensing agreement with the World Trade Organisation, and has led to major criticisms of other global pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Roche, and Bayer. According to these companies, India’s generic drug manufacturing industry is destroying R&D funding and future innovation. This is because the companies which invented the brand name drugs are not receiving royalties; and therefore, losing out on profit, a lot of which would have been put back into R&D. While the World Trade Organisation under the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement (Doha Declaration) has provided for the use of compulsory licenses (temporary patent rights for life-saving pharmaceuticals), recently India has been more lenient in its use of this stipulation. In fact, the first use was in 2012 for Nexavar. Since then India has used the compulsory licensing provision at least five times. The total numbers of Indian Pharmaceutical Companies those who are having Research and Development facilities and also having Intellectual Property Rights for the past five years consecutively are take for this study.