Institutions and Capacity Building for the Evolution of Intellectual Property Rights Regime in India: II — Ownership and Management Issues in Agricultural Research*

152-156The post World Trade Organization (WTO) developments towards the establishment of a well-defined IPR regime in the country, along with the advances in technological tools for agricultural research, have drawn serious attention of the national agricultural research system (NARS), leading to the development of their IPR management strategies, policy and guidelines, for an effective transfer of their IPR protected technologies. Two major international instruments, namely, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), broadly determine the ownership rights on IPR, and biological resources. In agricultural research/IPR regime, the need for a firm institutional policy or framework, and the implementation mechanism has been strongly felt and realized. This needs to spell out the issues of ownership, assignment and delegation of powers for execution of various IPR management steps, and incentives to encourage greater creativity and rapid innovativeness in the system. This paper analyses the issues, which are particularly related to the ownership and management concerns