[Ip-health] BusinessWorld: Mashelkar retreats

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http://www.businessworld.in/issue/news01.asp

The legal challenge to India=92s patent laws from Swiss drug giant Novartis=
 has taken a knock with a crucial report that it is banking on being withdr=
awn by its authors. In an unprecedented move, R.A. Mashelkar, former direct=
or-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), ask=
ed the government on 19 February to withdraw the report of the Technical Ex=
pert Group (TEG) that he had headed on account of =93certain technical inac=
curacies =85 that have inadvertently crept in=94.

 India=92s chief boffin, who submitted the report before demitting office l=
ast December, offered his =93unconditional apologies=94 to the government w=
hile taking full responsibility for =93this unfortunate development=94. Mas=
helkar has been accused by lawyers and health activists of pandering to the=
 multinational drug lobby after Novartis submitted the TEG report to the Ma=
dras High Court on 15 February. Novartis is challenging a specific prohibit=
ion in the law, Section 3 (d), which restricts the grant of patents.


The Lawyers Collective, which is fighting the Novartis petition on behalf o=
f the Cancer Patients Aid Association, had accused the TEG of lifting verba=
tim a paragraph from a 2006 report on limiting patentability by the Intelle=
ctual Property Institute (IPI), a UK-based think-tank that had submitted it=
s position to the group. The Lawyers Collective pointed out that the report=
 was authored by Shamnad Basheer, a doctoral student and an associate at th=
e Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre, University of Oxford, had b=
een crowing on his website about his coup in getting the critical paragraph=
 in the TEG report. They allege Basheer=92s research was commissioned by th=
e IPI and financially supported by Interpat, a Swiss association of major E=
uropean, Japanese and US research-based drug companies committed to the imp=
rovement of intellectual property laws around the world.


Basheer had last month hailed the TEG=92s recommendations, which support th=
e contention of Novartis, as =93a very sensible suggestion to me =97 not le=
ast because these conclusions were extracted from a report that I submitted=
 to the committee=94. Basheer had said it =93flatters one to know that the =
extraction happened verbatim, though I would have been happier had the comm=
ittee cited the source=94.

Mashelkar appears to have been left with little choice after the expose. Ho=
wever, his contention that he would submit a new report in three months aft=
er rectifying the errors, begs a question. Can a discredited committee be a=
llowed to make a fresh submission without a new mandate? Top officials of t=
he department of industrial policy and promotions (DIPP), which is looking =
at the report, were unavailable for comment. The government, meanwhile, is =
under pressure from the Indian drug industry to appoint a proper defence te=
am to counter the challenge to its patent law.

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