Govt not using patent law effectively: Pharma body
The Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, an association of
20 top Indian pharma companies that account for 80% of the country’s exports
and 46% of the domestic market, has submitted a report to the government that
says that public health safeguards in the patent law were not being used
effectively. The IPA pointed out that an analysis of patent filings between
2007 and 2012 had shown that a third of the patentees got away with not
disclosing whether a patent was being used or not and a third were defective or
incomplete.
In a report submitted to the Indian Patents Office
and the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, the IPA referred to an
ongoing case in the Delhi high court seeking directions to the government to
compel patentees and licensees to declare information on the working of their
patent as required under the Patent Act.
The IPA report pointed out that many subsections in
the Act were introduced to safeguard public health, prevent abuse of patent
rights and ensure that patents contributed to dissemination of technology. It
added that compulsory licences were a mechanism to ensure availability of
medicines at reasonable prices especially where patents were not being used.
The use of compulsory licence was not unusual as
there were 100 instances of their use between 2001 and 2016, of which six were
in the developed world, submitted the IPA.
These licences were largely for HIV (73), cancer (12)
and other diseases (15). So far, India has issued just one compulsory licence
in early 2012. Neither has India ever revoked a patent for non-working, nor has
the government granted compulsory licence for government use or for any public
health imperative.
IPA pointed out that the law empowered the controller
of patents to demand information from patentees and licensees annually on how
much the patent was being worked commercially. Such information was crucial to
assess the balance between incentivising innovation and promoting public health
by ensuring adequate availability of medicines at a reasonable price, IPA said.
The alliance demanded that the patents’ controller
place patent filings in the public domain and make them available under the RTI
Act so that civil society and NGOs could assess the extent to which patents
were being worked commercially. Just as the controller’s office had made
filings for 2012, 2013 public in a searchable database, it ought to digitize
all filings and make them available in a searchable database, it added. The
alliance urged the government to ensure that patent filing was done properly
and that required forms were complete so that the controller could assess how
the patent was being used to decide on granting or revoking compulsory licences
and patents
TOI 20MAR18
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