Prospects and Challenges of Geographical Indications in India

TLDR

Geographical indications have become a major intellectual property concern in India, with over a hundred products registered since 2003, yet stakeholders face practical challenges in realizing their benefits. The article explores India’s prospects for exploiting GI benefits and the key challenges in realizing them. Success depends on effective enforcement, resource‑intensive marketing and promotion, and institutional mechanisms to secure fair benefits for downstream producers. Since the GI Act took effect in 2003, over a hundred Indian products have been registered as GIs.

Abstract

In the recent past, geographical indications (GIs) have emerged as a significant intellectual property rights issue in the Indian context. Since 15 September 2003, when the Indian GI Act came into force, more than a hundred Indian products have been registered as GIs. However, there are several practical challenges confronting the stakeholders in India when it comes to the realization of the potential benefits ingrained in GIs. Apart from effective enforcement of the rights in the relevant markets (domestic and export), the success of a GI is contingent, in a large measure, upon appropriate marketing and promotion of the product—tasks that are not only resource‐intensive but also challenging to execute for many stakeholders from a developing country like India. It is all the more tricky to ensure that a fair share of the benefits accruing from the GI status of a product reaches the actual producers/artisans downstream in the supply chain, unless an appropriate institutional mechanism is set in place towards that end. Against this backdrop, the article attempts to explore the prospects for India in exploiting the potential benefits embedded in GIs and the key challenges confronting the country in its endeavour to realize such benefits.