The Bill to channel more patents from Indian universities for use in industry is now better placed to clear Parliament. The government has decided to split the rewards for the patent i.e. royalty, between the researcher, the publicly-funded institution where it is produced and itself equally.
Government officials working on the revised draft of the Bill said the three-way split should satisfy those opposing the Bill.
According to them, the new formula will be part of the Protection and Utilisation of Publicly Funded Intellectual Property Bill, 2008, (PUPFIP) to be reintroduced in the Monsoon session of the Parliament. For India, which is positioning itself as a knowledge economy, it is imperative that scientific research largely conducted in universities and government-run institutions is tapped more vigorously by the industry. The Bill will hope to incentivise these institutes to respond to industry needs, based on the model popularised by the Bayh Dole Act in the US.
Another key change is to encourage these institutions to patent downstream research (research with an immediate commercial application) rather than fundamental research. The reasoning is that in fundamental research, exclusive rights could actually impede further research, and that would be against the spirit of the academic enterprise.
?Under the original Bill, and the Bayh Dole Act of the US on which this was modelled, the idea was to give a fillip to innovation and therefore, the incentive was to accrue (mostly) to the researcher. This was objected to by activists and others who said that if the taxpayer was paying for the research, it would be unfair that the entire royalty goes to the researcher,? said a government source. According to Amit Shovan Ray, professor of economics at JNU and a specialist on the subject, the three-way split is not germane to the bill. ?The real issue is incentivising industry to tap such patents. which the present form of the bill does not address,? he said.
The Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha in 2008, but following objections from several quarters, it was referred to the standing committee on science and technology. Organisations including the National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies have pointed out the pros and cons of emulating the Bayh Dole Act.
Minister for science and technology Prithviraj Chavan confirmed to FE that the standing committee had sent its report and that the Bill would be re-introduced during the Monsoon session. ?We are hoping that with this bill, more and more downstream research will come out of publicly funded institutions,? he added.
As of now, according to the minister, scientific research and published papers by Indian scientists were way above the international average, although the country still has a long way to go before reaching the level of such research in China.