Raghunath Anant Mashelkar - Controversy

Controversy

In the year 2005, the government of India set up a technical expert group under the Chairmanship of Mashelkar on patent laws, which was to opine on whether the amendments made in the Indian Patent Law were TRIPS compliant or not. The committee comprised, besides Mashelkar legal luminaries on the issues of IPR, namely Dr. N.R. Madhava Menon and Prof. Moolchand Sharma. It also had luminaries from the scientific world, Prof. Goverdhan Mehta and Prof. Asis Dutta as members.

All the five members of the committee unanimously opined in their 'Report of the Technical Expert Group on Patent Law Issues' that the amendments were not TRIPS compliant, since Article 27 of TRIPS stated that no technology or field could be excluded from patenting as long as it met the basic criteria of novelty, non-obviousness and utility, whereas the Indian patent amendments meant that only new chemical entities satisfying certain criteria could be patented.

This report led to controversy, which was voiced by the Communist Party of India (CPI-M), certain NGOs and certain sections of the drugs and pharmaceutical industry of India, which were keen on maintaining a system that did not allow for incremental innovations to be patented in this sector. Incidentally it was the CPI-M through its report titled Left Parties on Amendments to the Indian Patent Act, which had urged the government to bring in these changes, which were not part of the ordinance that was passed by the government.

The controversy got highlighted in the media, since some of the text in the report was reported, without attribution to the original source, especially that of Prof. Shamnaad Basheer. There was an accusation of plagiarism. This accusation was highlighted through two editorial pieces published simultaneously in the Times of India and The Hindu.

According to Prof. Shamnaad Basheer, this allegation was unfounded. As cited on his blog he wrote "It is unfortunate that my blog has been selectively quoted to support allegations that the Committee ‘plagiarised’ from my report. This is not correct, as amply borne out by the last sentence in the blog: "To be fair to the Committee, they did include the crux of my submission in an Annex to their Report." In other words, the Committee did include the key points in my submission as an Annexure, as they did with every other submission (about 24 in all) that was made to them. Merriam Webster defines ‘plagiarising’ as "presenting as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source." Those with the patience to read the entire report including the Annexures would have gathered that some of the Committee’s observations were borrowed from my report and not 'plagiarised'.

On February 19, 2007, Mashelkar withdrew his report from the government in a letter addressed to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry due to the alleged plagiarism, admitting to flaws in the report, and further clarifying that "This is the first time such a thing has happened."

CPI-M and patent law experts raised the Mashelkar controversy in the Indian Parliament, demanding that the report be "trashed" and given the industry capture evident in his report, that the issues be referred to a joint standing committee.

However, the Government of India did not accept this position and referred the report back to the technical expert group to re-examine and correct the inaccuracies.

However, subsequently, an article published in the Times of India claimed plagiarisation in the book co-authored by Shahid Ali Khan and Mashelkar, in that certain paras from the text from British IPR expert Graham Dutfield were quoted without attribution. Subsequently, Mashelkar, while admitting this unfortunate error reported that the attribution was correctly given with the first possible opportunity that arose with the publication of the Indian edition of the book in 2006.