The Union government is learnt to have decided to put up the third amendments to the Product Patent Bill for the consideration of the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC). The Bill, which will be taken up by the commerce ministry in the current Parliament session, will duly be referred to JPC for its scrutiny, according to informed sources.

However, the Union government is still not certain about meeting the 2005 deadline to open up the product patent era by complying with TRIPS. Though the informed sources are hopeful about the commerce ministry efforts to pass the Bill in the ministry officials first session of the Parliament in 2005 after the JPC scrutiny, it is very unlikely that the Product Patent be brought into effect as per schedule, that is from January 1 2005, said the sources.

It may be recalled that the Indian Drug Manufacturers Association (IDMA) had last week pleaded that the government should refer the third amendments to the specially constituted Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) before introducing the same in the Parliament. However, the IDMA chairman Yogin Majmudar said that the Association is yet to receive any official response to their letter in this regard. But he said that since there are strong suggestions from the industry to introduce the Bill only after the strict scrutiny of the contents by the JPC, the government would not have any option but to leave it to the committee.

IDMA in its plea to the Prime Minister and other concerned ministries had pointed out that in the recent past, there have been several important developments about the TRIPS agreement as well as objective studies such as the Report of UK Commission on Intellectual Property Rights; UNDP Report on "Making Trade Work for Poor People"; Report of Human Rights Commission, authoritative Reports from Third World Network, Reports from several eminent International Economists, etc. Since all these studies have ably suggested that a careful and objective approach needs to be adopted by the developing countries so as to safeguard society's interests, i.e. to ensure that the "Product Patent" system, creating drug product monopolies, also serves the public properly specially in regard to health and nutrition.

IDMA had cautioned that considering the utmost importance of the subject, the Patents (third amendment) Bill has to be referred to the Joint Parliamentary Committee, so that it can make important and major changes if necessary in the Bill to safeguard public interests.