Letter to the PM: Why the new Indo-US ‘Bilateralism’ on Intellectual Property?

Several organisations and individuals from across Indiahave collectively sent a letter to the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, expressing their concerns on the Joint Working Group on Intellectual Property (IP) set up between India and the United States of America. The announcement for this bilateral arrangement had come during the Prime Minister’s maiden official visit to USA. (See the paragraph on ‘Economic Growth’ in the US-India Joint Statement dated 30 September 2014, full text here:http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/30/us-india-joint-statement)

The letter expresses their anguish on the decision to establish the Working Group. The letter urges the Prime Minister to approach the IP issue with a “holistic perspective that itwarrants, rather than the official approach being subsumed by the relatively narrow confines of trade and economic policy”.The letter also requests the Prime Minister “to take a personal interest in this important matter”, as IP affects basic needs such as food, medicine and education, etc. which are not trade issues.

Further, the letter cautions that “bilateralism in the area of IP must be approached with an extremely high degree of caution”, particularly when it comes to USA. The US administration and its trade negotiators are notorious for demanding IP standards that go well the World Trade Organisation (WTO)’s IP agreement, namely TRIPS.

It is important to recall that in the multilateral system WTO (where US had initiated proceedings against India on the IP issue at the Dispute Settlement Body in 1996, within a year of WTO coming into force in 1995) and outside it unilaterally (through its ‘Priority Watch List’ and Out-of-Cycle Review under its Trade Act of 1974), USA continues to exert pressures on countries that it sees as IP offenders.

The people’s letter makes the following specific requestson IP to the Prime Minister:

• To make public the specific purpose of the joint Working Group on IP
• To maintain the GoI’sstand of non-cooperation with any unilateralmeasures by the US Government on this front
• To refrain from going ahead with the proposed bilateral annual forum on IP, particularly in the absence of a domestic process on IP issues
• Topursue an inclusive public consultation approach for the formulation of India’s IP Policy, a process which is underway within the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) under the Ministry of Commerce& Industry
• To maintain the flexibilities in the various domestic IP statutes and not to amendany of the IP statutes in order to reduce the scope of flexibilities
• To reach out to the like-minded countries to not only build a coalition to resist such pressures from US and other developed countries, but also to be able to continue to supply cheaper generic medicines to low & middle income countries
• To support local innovations,that offer more sustainable options for the future – such as climate-adaptive seeds

By Shalini Bhutani