Will India protect intellectual property?

Part VI: Will infrastructure be a problem?

Will India protect intellectual property?

Earlier this year, India passed a milestone in the protection of intellectual property. Despite loud protests from nongovernmental organisations and some domestic politicians, the Parliament approved a new patent protection law that prohibits Indian companies from copying the products of other companies.

This legislation -— a response to pressure from the World Trade Organisation -— was aimed primarily at pharmaceutical manufacturers, which have expanded by making cheap knockoffs of patented medicines. Yet India's major pharma companies backed the change: many of them have matured from copiers into innovators, so they also now need the added protection.

In other industries, too, the new law has raised confidence that intellectual property will receive protection. Monsanto, for example, is now marketing genetically altered seeds in India. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, helped by an unprecedented push on the part of its publisher, sold close to a quarter of a million legitimate copies in the country on the first day of its release -— 20 times more than any other book ever had. Now that the new protection is in place, the government must enforce it or risk losing the goodwill (and sales) it is generating.

Adil S Zainulbhai is a director in McKinsey's Mumbai office. This commentary first appeared in India Abroad, the newspaper owned by rediff.com