Mashelkar Report Version Il: Wrong Again

18 Pages Posted: 19 Oct 2009

Date Written: October 13, 2009

Abstract

The government’s acceptance of the second version of the Technical Expert Group Report (hereafter ‘TEG Report’) headed by RA Mashelkar has been followed by a shrill sustained campaign that seeks to assert the truth of the Report’s claims by merely proclaiming it from every available forum. Any criticism of the Report is met with a strong chorus of denunciation usually ascribing poor intellectual abilities, bad motives, Orwellian sophistry or all of these. This campaign has assumed Goebbelsian proportions and poses a grave risk to rational and empirically grounded public policy formulation. I have commented elsewhere on the dangerous implications for public policy making that the process adopted by the first Technical Expert Group Report represents. In this essay, I respond to the TEG’s Second Report and argue: first, that its recommendations are not warranted by the TRIPs agreement; secondly, that it is not supported by the weight of academic opinion; and thirdly, that these conclusions do not rest on any reasonable assessment of the national interest in pharmaceutical policy.

Keywords: patent law, India, pharmaceutical patents, TRIPs Agreement

Suggested Citation

Krishnaswamy, Sudhir, Mashelkar Report Version Il: Wrong Again (October 13, 2009). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1487948 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1487948

Sudhir Krishnaswamy (Contact Author)

Columbia Law School ( email )

435 West 116th Street
New York, NY 10025
United States

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