new delhi

The United States is threatening not to renew its science and technology agreement with India if the Indian government fails to amend its patent laws to provide additional protection for intellectual property rights. About 130 projects could face the axe as a result.

India's current patent legislation, passed in 1970, does not allow patents in the food, chemicals and pharmaceuticals sectors.

After India joined the World Trade Organization in 1995, the government drafted legislation conforming to the organization's guidelines on intellectual property. But the proposed legislation has been blocked by the parliament's upper house, most of whose members come from opposition parties.

They argue that patents would make essential drugs too expensive for the poor, and allow seed companies to make agriculture too costly for marginal farmers. They also oppose patenting of any life forms.

Washington's warning of the potential consequences for collaboration in science and technology was conveyed to India by Frank Wisner, the US ambassador in New Delhi. He said last week that both his government and US industry were “deeply concerned about the lack of adequate intellectual property rights protection provided by current Indian law, regulation and practice”.

Wisner said that, until the situation is changed, the United States would be unable to negotiate a new science and technology agreement, and that “certain areas of research and training will be closed to cooperation”. Wisner was speaking to senior Indian and US scientists at a meeting intended to draw up a strategy for future scientific collaboration.

The US decision has already generated strong reaction. India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, for example, which is responsible for about 40 laboratories and has agreements with 35 countries, said that it objected to “any conditions being placed for scientific and technological cooperation”.

M. G. K. Menon, a physicist and former Indian science minister, says that any changes in Indian patent law should be made in a way that suits “our best national interests”, and should not be dictated by the United States. “We can do without US help,” says Sandip Basu, director of the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi.

Scientific cooperation between India and the United States has been operating in low gear since 1987, when differences about intellectual property rights first surfaced.

Roughly 130 projects, in different stages of completion, would have to terminate at the end of this year, when the US-India Fund, through which joint projects have been funded since 1987, will dry up. The US embassy in New Delhi says that the fund will not be replenished. The only project that would continue would be a vaccine research programme for which there is an assurance of continued funding.

Officials in the Indian ministry of science and technology are uncertain about the future shape of scientific and technological collaboration between the two countries. But they remain optimistic that collaboration will continue with individual US scientists and their funding agencies, where the work is carried out without the direct involvement of the US State Department.