India's Pharmaceutical Industry: A Growing Influential Force in the World Pharmaceutical Market

ndia has been newsworthy as a result of its indigenous pharmaceutical industry selling low-cost AIDS cocktails to South Africa in direct competition with drugs manufactured by multinationals. These triple combination antiretroviral entities were thought to be protected by product patents through multilateral trade negotiations (TRIPS). Impoverished markets offer little incentive to highly profitable multinationals to provide drugs there. 1 The resultant controversy over intellectual property rights—patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets—and a suitable strategy to prioritize relief for the mounting suffering in Third World nations from AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and a dozen other causes of vast morbidity and mortality, has led AIDS activists to claim that “Patents Kill.” The Economist has written that patents have been the preserve of western multinational companies, “allowing them to establish monopolies, drive out local competition, divert research and development away from the needs of poor countries and force up the price of everything from seeds to software. In the process, patents prevent poor people from getting life-saving drugs, interfere with age-old farming practices, and allow foreign ‘pirates’ to raid local resources, such as medicinal plants, without getting permission or paying compensation.”