Where India Fears To Tread

Even rich nations are using compulsory .licences to ensure cheaper life-saving drugs for public healthcare unlike India.

- Latha Jishnu

FIRST IT was Germany and now Russia. As prices of life-saving medicines, especially those for treating cancer skyrocket, rich nations are now resorting to a measure they once opposed strenuously: the use of compulsory licences (CLs). A CL is a legal way to override patents to allow countries to produce cheaper versions of a product, usually medicines, by paying a fixed royalty to the patent holder. All these years, developed countries have opposed the use of CLs by poor countries because they claimed it undermined the rationale of intellectual property (IP) protection. But they were protecting the profits of the powerful innovator drug companies.

Increasingly, as prices of new generation drugs become prohibitive, even the most developed nations are finding it impossible to include such drugs in their public healthcare programmes. Not even the US, the UK or Germany can afford to provide a drug that costs as much as US $1,000 a pop or $84,0