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Abstract
The World Trade Organization (WTO) and Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which made product patents compulsory for countries to follow, meant that the entire market for generic drugs was out of bounds for manufacturing till the time the products went off-patent. The TRIPS has generated widespread discussions and debates around the costs and benefits of new patent regimes on countries such as India. This article analyses whether the post-WTO system was consistent with, and conducive to, improved public health in India. It is a first-of-its-kind effort in which the data on pharmaceutical patents applications were collected, collated, cleaned and classified according to IPC codes, to enable preliminary understanding of the nature and type of the applications. The patent applications that are filed in India are not found to be consistent with the disease burden of the country.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledged the financial support as well as comments on this study by the UNCTAD-India programme. The authors want to gratefully acknowledge the help extended by Bhaven N. Sampat from the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, who kindly provided the data on published Indian patent applications.
Notes
2. Professor Bhaven Sampat, Mailman School of Public Health, has created a data-set of all published Indian patent applications and patents, which is now available on a free website (india.bigpatents.org) where people can search for pending applications. The raw data – in a database format – were supplied to this research team by Prof. Sampat.
3. Keeping in mind the objective of the study, the research team decided to consider only those applications which have IPC codes A61K (preparations for medical, dental, or toilet purposes), and A61P (therapeutic activity of chemical compounds or medicinal preparations).
4. Wherever group classifications were not possible due to their non-specificity to a particular disease cause, like perfume, usage in inhibiting vascular permeability, fusion proteins, etc. they were separately labelled and grouped under the category ‘other’.
5. Since there was only one patent application in 1992, none in 1993 and 1994, and very few in 2008, figures for these years were not considered while constructing the figures.