Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will today announce the country's first Intellectual Property Rights or IPR policy. (File photo)
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will today announce the country's first Intellectual Property Rights or IPR policy. The policy was cleared by Cabinet yesterday.
According to government sources, the policy is totally complaint with the World Trade Organisations agreement on trade related aspects of IPR (trips)
"The policy incorporates Prime Minister Narendra Modi's suggestion to have a special emphasis on awareness generation, effective IPR enforcement and encouraging IP commercialisation through incentives," a senior government official said.
The policy will focus on creating IPR awareness at school and college level and may even recommend making it a part of the syllabus and promote organisations such as the national research development corporation to help commercial exploitation of patents and inventions developed by educational institutions
The policy, sources say, includes incentives such as tax benefits and fee waivers to encourage research and development in IT sector to strengthen PM's pet projects Make in India, Start Up India and Digital India
The policy may also offer protection to small inventions developed for the informal or unorganised sectors along with promoting utility patents which have low compliance burden and shorter duration of protection as compared to normal patents.
However, the policy may not extend the utility patents criteria to the pharmaceutical sector as it involves sensitive issues like efficacy of drugs, a source said.
The IPR policy has been in the works for some time. Cabinet secretariat had circulated a note among 30 odd departments for suggestions.
A senior government source said that the policy doesn't propose any changes in the existing Indian IPR laws or policies on the patent-disabling compulsory licencing and the provision preventing "ever greening" of drug patents ( a method which involves minor changes of an existing drug)
The NDA government had set up an IPR think tank in 2015 which submitted its report in April 2015.