Promoting Diversity in Pharmaceutical Innovation and Access: India's Experience in the Post-TRIPS World

Abstract

The core thesis of this paper is to articulate the premise that a diversity of approaches to patent law and policy must be encouraged for promoting pharmaceutical innovation and access. This is owing to the fact that such diversity may hold the key to transforming the “rule-based” system into a “principle-based” system, which could better and more consistently respond to both global and local challenges involving pharmaceutical innovation and access. This point is discussed below by taking India’s patent law and policy encounters as an example. The idea is not to undermine the importance of a rule-based international system of IP obligations, which provide security and predictability in the trading regime. Instead, it is to transcend beyond the current “rule-based” into a more nuanced “principle-based” system that still can adequately and accurately foster pharmaceutical innovation and access.

Keywords: Patents, Pharmaceuticals, India, Section 3(d), Compulsory Licence