Articles by Sudip Chaudhuri

The Supreme Court judgment on the Novartis-Glivec case is remarkable because it has gone beyond the specific technical and legal issues surrounding patents and has put the matter in a much larger political and economic perspective. The deeper implication of the judgment is that it is not only justified to deny patents when incremental innovation is trivial as in the Glivec case. The judgment has linked the entire question of patenting with net benefits to society and has highlighted the relevance of specific conditions of a country for deciding the appropriate patent regime. What the judgment says and what it implies has tremendous significance for the patent regimes in developing countries beyond the secondary patenting issues.

In January 2005, drug product patent protection was reintroduced in India to comply with the agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. How are the multinational pharmaceutical companies responding to the new policy environment? Is India likely to see monopolisation of the industry and high prices, which was the pattern before 1972 when India had product patent protection? Will the positive features of the post-1972 process patent era be diluted or negated? This study finds that the MNCS have started marketing new patented drugs in India at exorbitant prices particularly for life-threatening diseases such as cancer. The manufacturing and importing behaviour of the MNCS since the 1990s bear a close resemblance to that before the 1970s. Imports of high-priced finished formulations are expanding rapidly with manufacturing investments lagging far behind. The MNCS are also expanding vigorously in the generic segments and are trying to grow not only organically but through mergers & acquisitions and strategic alliance with Indian generic companies.

Globalisation of Services: India’s Opportunities and Constraints by Rupa Chanda; Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2002; npp 276, Rs 595.

This paper focuses on the impact of India's economic reforms on industrial structure and productivity. It reveals a disappointing overall performance in both output growth and employment. This, however, is not the result of exogenous factors,but the consequence of the type of policies being followed under economic reforms. If mistakes were made in the past, they need to be corrected. But efforts should be made to ensure that demand is high enough for more output to be produced, more people to be employed, poverty to be reduced.

A basic premise underlying much of the critical writing on public enterprises is that there is something wrong with public enterprises per se. The author contests this view that public enterprises are inherently inefficient and contends that a crucial aspect has been the objectives and the priorities with which the public enterprises have been run. The focus of the paper is on the manufacturing enterprises under the central government FOR quite some time now the public enterprises (PEs) in India have been subject to attack. The critics refer to the low financial return of the PEs and their poor service, shortages and delays in delivering goods and services, etc. Of course others point out that the deficiencies of the PEs have often been exaggerated. Nagaraj (1993), for example, found that the financial performance of the PEs, in India improved in the 1980s and their resource generation effort is now comparable to that of the private corporate sector. Some PEs, for example, Bharat Heavy Electricals has significant achievements to their creduit [Lochan 1991; Ramamurti 1987]. But it is generally agreed that the performance of the PEs on the whole has been less than their potential and below the expectations with which they were set up.