IGI Logo

A working paper by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) has said that India needs to adopt an ‘offensive posture’ and international best practices with regard to intellectual property rights (IPR) with an aim to become the centre of the global knowledge economy. It said India must shed its traditional reticence to participate in international best practices that are critical to making India the centre of the global knowledge economy. It said ‘if India wants to be a major R&D hub and a place for cutting-edge manufacturing and IP generation, we need to move away from a defensive to an offensive posture.’

The paper, titled 'India and Global IPR Treaties' said ‘instead of defending domestic markets, our focus must be on laying the groundwork for Indian innovators to capture global markets.’ It noted ‘for far too long, India’s policies have been tuned to be defensive in benchmarking ourselves to global standards. This is ultimately counter-productive since we ultimately accept those foreign innovations anyway.’

While emphasising that India must shed its traditional reticence to participate in international best practices, the paper said ‘the Strasbourg Agreement on patents will entail no change in our domestic law, while the two treaties on industrial designs (Hague Agreement and Design Law Treaty) will require amendments to the provisions of Designs Act 2000 that deal with procedural elements’. Since Independence, the paper said ‘India's IPR system has been defensive because we started with the assumption that Indian innovators cannot compete with international counterparts’. It added that this is no longer the case with an unprecedented rise in domestic filings of IPR and even MNCs generating IPRs in India with their global capability centres. It said India needs to take an offensive stance on IPR today as Indian entities are as likely to generate these IPRs with tremendous economic potential in the global markets.