An instructively strange combination of Marxists, NGOs and big Indian pharma companies will be celebrating R.A. Mashelkar’s decision to resign from the patents experts’ panel. Mashelkar had responded with alacrity to reports about a plagiarised paragraph in the report submitted earlier. A whisper campaign started, loud enough to be heard in corridors of political decision-making — apparently the whole report was horribly compromised, a conspiracy, no less, by greedy MNCs to hold public health to ransom. Lamentably, this kind of campaign still works effectively in India, two years after the patent law was changed and 15 years after liberalisation, during which MNCs have been shown to be just another kind of commercial entity. With Mashelkar gone — he can have a valid complaint that no one who mattered seemed to have defended his integrity — and this government’s willingness to regress on liberal economic matters clearly on the rise, it is anyone’s guess what will happen to the question of changing the relevant patent provisions. The Mashelkar committee had recommended, absolutely rightly, that incremental innovation be made patentable. Much of progress in pharma involves significant improvements in existing products, as restricting patents only to new molecules is illogical. Plus, India’s pharma industry benefits hugely from such a rule. R&D costs of new molecules are dauntingly large. Working on a patented product of, say, a Western MNC and devising a genuinely improved version is a better alternative — but this is pointless if India itself won’t grant patents on incremental innovation. The disincentive can kill Indian pharma’s potential of becoming the next big thing after IT. Pharma companies that only have generic products will oppose further patent law reform. Such self-interested lobbying is standard and should be, ultimately, ignored. And equally, ‘radicals’ of various descriptions will make a false argument about the poor’s health. The real problem there is that too little is spent on public health and only 15 per cent of that goes to buying medicines. Would that ‘radicals’ campaigned about that — loudly.
