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The Supreme Court declined to interfere with a Delhi High Court order in the long-running intellectual property dispute over PepsiCo India’s registration of the FL 2027 (FC-5) potato variety used to make Lay’s potato chips.
A bench of justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran held that PepsiCo’s registration could not be revoked under Section 34(h) of the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights (PPVFR) Act merely because the company had sued Gujarat farmers for infringement, while clarifying that individual farmers can still invoke protection under Section 39(1)(iv) of the Act if PepsiCo takes them to court.
Kavitha Kuruganti, a farmers’ rights activist who had sought revocation of PepsiCo’s registration and later challenged the High Court order in the Supreme Court, called the judgment “deeply disappointing”. She said the Bench had upheld Section 39(1)(iv) “in letter but not in spirit”, by making farmers prove their rights in court rather than treating PepsiCo’s suits against them as a violation of public interest under Section 34(h) — the ground on which she had originally sought revocation.
The case dates back to 2018 and 2019, when PepsiCo India sued at least nine potato farmers in Gujarat for alleged patent infringement, seeking damages of more than Rs 1 crore from each. The company, however, withdrew all the cases unconditionally in May 2019.
Kuruganti subsequently filed a revocation application under Section 34 of the PPVFR Act, and the authority revoked PepsiCo’s 2016 registration in December 2021. A single-judge Bench of the Delhi High Court upheld the revocation in 2023, but a Division Bench of the High Court set aside that order in January 2024. Kuruganti then challenged the ruling before the Supreme Court.
Kuruganti pointed to the August 5, 2026 hearing, where she said the Bench “sought clarity and took cognisance” of the statutory provision on farmers’ rights, but ultimately did not accept that suing farmers under Section 28, as PepsiCo had done against potato farmers in Gujarat, amounted to a matter of public interest warranting revocation.
She argued that the Court had failed to reckon with what she called PepsiCo’s “modus operandi” against smallholder farmers, contrasting India’s sui generis PPVFR framework with patent regimes like the one in the United States, where companies such as Monsanto have sued farmers.
“The SC Bench had in front of it the arguments presented by the petitioner to show the legislative intent of the Parliament of India in the creation of a unique sui generis law called ‘Protection of Plant Varieties & Farmers' Rights Act 2001’. The original Bill tabled in 1999 had sought to severely restrict farmers’ seed freedoms through Sections 31 and 34 of the Bill by curtailing their rights to only commercial produce and not seed, whereas the 2001 statute had a new Chapter included on Farmers' Rights including a Sec 39(1)(iv), which gave over-arching rights to farmers over even sale of seed of protected varieties with a proviso that restricts the right to unbranded sales,” Kuruganti said in a statement.
She said the judgment was “inexplicable” given that, during oral arguments on August 5, PepsiCo’s counsel, when pressed by the Bench on why the company had sued farmers, had cited competition from rivals as the reason, a rationale she said also ran through PepsiCo’s written submissions across the litigation.