India has introduced the long-awaited legislation that will bring it more in line with the World Trade Organization rules about manufacturing generic versions of drugs. Right now, India only grants patents based on the manufacturing process and not on the resulting product itself. The proposed legislation would make the Indian government issue patents on all new products after developed after 1995.
The legislation worries a couple different groups of people...
The first, of course, is the group of generics manufacturers in India. They had previously gotten around some of the patent laws by coming up with a new method of menufacture and then selling a drug at a much lower price than it is made in the West. The government's response to that fear is, basically, "with the huge population and amount of R&D, education and manufacturing here, we're not worried."
Developing nations have also depended on these low-priced generics and fear that prices will rise. The government again dismisses that fear, saying that with the number of drugs going off-patent, generics won't rise in price, and WTO rules allow India to ship its generics to those countries.
It sounds like there will be an inevitable rise in the cost of some drugs that are patented there (why not? you have a negative monopoly, after all). It will also be interesting to see if India introduces something like Hatch-Waxman to get approvals of the drugs. Depending on how it's structured, that could abate some fears about pricing by the generic manufacturers, though it likely won't thrill the developing nations.
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