US Chamber pats India for framing pro-West IPR policy
15 May 2016 12:51 AM GMT
“We hope the announcement is a precursor to the concrete, structural changes that are necessary if India is to implement a strong IP-led innovation model,” said Patrick Kilbride, Executive Director of International Intellectual Property of the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC).
His remarks came on a day the Indian government announced a comprehensive National Intellectual Property Rights policy, in a move to incentivise entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation and curb manufacturing and sale of counterfeits. “We welcome the government’s understanding that India’s innovative economy requires effective IP protection and hope this commitment will lead to decisive legal reforms,” Kilbride said.
The policy, with a tagline of ‘Creative India: Innovative India’, called for updating various intellectual property laws to remove anomalies and inconsistencies in consultation with stakeholders. India must provide enhanced certainty for the rights of innovators in line with international best practices, the United States Chamber official said.
“We will be carefully reviewing this policy to determine whether this document creates the foundation for such steps. Regardless, Intellectual Property will continue to be a central issue for any discussions between India and the international business community,” Kilbride said.
Meanwhile, India and the United States of America have formed a Brain Trust aimed at deepening and strengthening cooperation between the best and brightest in the scientific community of the world’s two largest democracies. The partnership between the Indian and American scientific community, researchers, academicians, businesses and entrepreneurs is a “win-win” for not only the two countries, but also the entire world, said Indian Ambassador to the United States of America Arun K Singh.
“We find now a strategic convergence in our interest and we are working together in different areas,” he said in his address at the inaugural dinner of the India-United States Brain Trust here. A partnership for research and development and scientific collaboration is essential to take this relationship to the next level, he said.
“There is a huge potential there,” he added. “Several major United States companies have developed products in India, which their chief executive officers have said to me they could not have developed in the United States of America because researchers and scientists here approach the problem from different perspective with different resource availability, they are targeting with different objective,” Singh said.
“Whereas in India the aim very often is to minimize the use of resources, keep the cost down, maximize the number of people that can be reached through the product and there by you end up with something that is different and has relevance in a different context,” he said.
Applauding India s success, former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz said India has now emerged as a model for other developing countries. “The idea is to create a platform which partners scientific minds from both countries to explore and create timely solutions to pressing global challenges,” said Ron Somers, founder and chief executive officer of India First Group, welcoming the guests at the inaugural dinner.
“The Indo-US Brain Trust must strive to create a shared platform for the US and Indian scientific communities to exchange, synergize, and deepen collaboration,” he added.
Dr Krishna K Banaudha, an Indian-American scientist and the brain behind the project, said Indo-US Brain Trust intends to assemble some of the finest minds and friends who - by their very actions and livelihoods - support a deepening of US-India collaboration in science, research, academia, entrepreneurship and innovation.
“This group collectively represents the extraordinary partnership underway between the United States and India which is shaping a very bright future,” he said.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said last week that the Government is putting in place a mechanism to
drastically bring down the time period for registration of trademark to one month by 2017.
India’s GDP likely to grow 7.7% in FY17: NCAER
Economic think-tank NCAER on Saturday projected India’s economic growth rate to improve marginally to 7.7 per cent in 2016-17 against the backdrop of IMD’s forecast of better monsoon rains this year. The agriculture sector has witnessed feeble growth on account of drought for two successive years. The average rate of growth in the agricultural and allied sectors’ GDP for 2014-15 and 2015-16 has been a low 0.5 per cent. Two consecutive years of sub-par monsoon have had a significant impact on the output of both food as well as non-food crops.
India Meteorological Department (IMD) has predicted monsoon for 2016-17 at 106 per cent of the Long Period Average (LPA) with a model error of 5 per cent, “which may have a positive impact on agriculture and thereby the economy,” NCAER said in its Quarterly Review of the Economy. “NCAER’s annual model for GDP market prices at 2011 12 prices estimates GDP growth rate of 7.6 per cent for 2015 2016 and forecasts it at 7.7 per cent for 2016 17,” the economic think tank said in a statement.
It further said growth in exports and imports, year-on-year, is projected at (-) 1.6 per cent and (-) 0.6 per cent respectively for 2016-17. Inflation (WPI) is projected at 0.9 per cent for the fiscal. Current Account Balance as a percentage of GDP is projected at (-) 1 per cent and fiscal deficit as a percentage of GDP at 3.5 per cent for 2016-17.
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