In our past posts we talked about India and their IP laws focused on providing their community affordable medicines for those with less resources. We also talked about the big pharmaceutical companies and their desire to exploit their medicines regardless the sick people who need them and can’t afford the inflated prices.
We recently heard about the meeting between US president Barack Obama and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. Even though they didn’t sign anything, Obama promised 4 billion American dollars as an investment in India and Modi said that India was willing to accept the suggestions. Obama has publicly and politically shown he cares about health in the US with his new Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) that covers a bigger part of the community and a wider range of treatments for chronic diseases (amongst other changes). On the other hand, India is on a “priority watch list” that identifies countries which do not provide «adequate and effective» protection of intellectual property rights or «fair and equitable market access to United States persons that rely upon intellectual property rights.”
The IPP issue resides at the heart of the proposed and already mentioned in our previous entries Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement among 12 nations in the Asia Pacific accounting for 40 percent of world gross domestic product and one-third of world trade. This TPP does not include China nor India.
It’s very hard to see how can Obama and Modi resolve these tensions and it does not seem like an easy task to complete but Obama needs some support before the next presidential Elections in 2016 and if he could manage to obtain a win in this sensitive situation he will probably be facing a few more years at the White House.
Irean Navas 
