No more thieving

INDIA is arming itself take on the enemy
in the 'gene war'. It will no longer be
easy for foreign firms to steal centuries-old traditional Indian plant varieties. In
a bid to check any attempt to 'pilfer' the
country's vast plant genetic heritage
worth billions of dollars, India is
strengthening its patent laws.

The government is proposing stringent measures under a new law called
Plant Varieties Protection Act. Over
2,300 currently unprotected Indian
plant varieties would be covered by the
law. The law would help evolve a self-
generating system to suit Indian needs
and protect the rights of farmers for use
and reuse as seed, selling farm produce
and deposition of gene samples to a
national gene bank. The law would be
based on the Union for Protection of
New Varieties of Plants, an agreement
signed in 1987 and renewed in 1991 by
33 countries including India, said R S
Paroda, director-general of the Indian
Council of Agricultural Research. India
had protested strongly when a us firm
had recently tried to get a patent for the
traditional neem plant.