Suggestions To Changes In Policy And Legal Framework To Ensure Access

The 'ultimate objective' of patenting public funding should be to ensure access to the public funded inventions for public good. But, currently in India, we do not have provisions to effectuate the actual social benefits from public funded research by ensuring access to the public. Thus, the policy makers should have brought forward a set of model guidelines that could have addressed all these concerns existing around Intellectual Property Protection and Commercialisation. This is not to suggest that the issue of commercialisation of institutional IP is not pertinent. However, this model for Intellectual Property Protection and Commercialisation is not a fit policy taking into account the current needs of our public funded research system. What is required is the appreciation of underlying structural problems in our public funded research system and then taking policy cues from other developed countries and fine tuning them to our needs.