Mashelkar gets time to purge 'follies'

The commerce ministry has allowed the technical expert group headed by former Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Chief R A Mashelkar to correct the "technical inacuracies" in the patent law report and re-submit it within three months.

Mashelkar had wanted the report to be withdrawn as 10 sentences in the report were plagiarised due to "inadvertent" mistakes at the drafting level.

Meanwhile, Graham Dutfield, a senior researcher with the University of London, in a mail to Internet discussion groups has rejected Mashelkar's report as "absolute rubbish" that it "should be trashed completely".

Dutfield's reasons: "These people plagiarised 14 lines of Shamnad Basheer's paper plus 22 lines comprising a slight "repackaging" of the definitions of micro-organism compiled from the literature by Margaret Llewelyn and Mike Adcock for the Quaker UN Office as presented (and correctly cited) in Basheer's report. That's my count but I may have missed more than this. So that is 36 lines from, well, not a 56-page report, as the Indian Press tends to state, but one that just about stretches to 10 pages excluding annexes...

"... the whole report looks very suspicious to me. My guess is that the conclusions had been decided on from the start. This would explain their total disinterest in producing any original and objective legal and technical evidence to support those conclusions. I think they just couldn't be bothered. Therein lies the real scandal of this affair, not the plagiarism..."

Reacting to the government's decision, CPI-M iterated on Thursday its demand that the patent issues should be handed over to a joint parliamentary committee and not left with the technical expert group as "vital portions of the report were an act of plagariasm and cheating" and were aimed at protecting "the interest of multinationals".

TEG was set up to examine the trade related intellectual property rights agreement of the World Trade Organisation compatibility of limiting the grant of patents to new chemical entities (only new discoveries and not new uses of old discoveries).

It was also asked to examine whether it would be compatible with  TRIPS to exclude micro-organisms from patenting.