Plant Variety Protection and Farmers Rights in India: A Critical Analysis under the PPV&FR Act, 2001

Abstract

Recognizing the significance of Sui Generis System in the World and one of the most important among them is “India's Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act, 2001”. The legislation, which was adopted to fulfill India's obligation under “Article 27.3(b) of the TRIPS Agreement”, was consciously designed to jettison the "breeder-centric" approach of the “1991 UPOV Convention” in favor of putting the cultivating, conserving and breeding farmer at the heart of the intellectual-property equation. The author has critically evaluated the Act twenty years after its operationalisation in this review paper, with reference to the “Luxembourg Accords on catechetical reform”. It presents an overview of the international and constitutional framework of the law, reviews the system of breeders and farmers rights and rights and benefits of communities, and evaluates the institutional and adjudicatory mechanisms set up in the Act. The paper relies on some benchmark disputes, such as “Monsanto Technology LLC v. Nuziveedu Seeds Ltd.” and the “PepsiCo FC-5 potato dispute”, to contend that normatively the statute is a precursor, but it is incomplete in its transformative potential. Persistent gaps in “farmer awareness”, an “underutilized benefit-sharing” and “National Gene Fund mechanism”, definitional ambiguity around the “branded seed” proviso, an unresolved interface with the “Patents Act, 1970”, and the post-2021 dilution of specialized adjudication have blunted the Act's redistributive edge. The paper concludes with a set of legal and economic reform proposals aimed at restoring the balance between innovation incentives and the livelihood security of India's farming communities.