ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the position India has taken in the Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) negotiations. For more than a decade and a half, India has consistently been emphasising the need to protect genetic resources (GR) and traditional knowledge (TK), the latter defined in a broad sense so as to include folklore or the more current expression, 'tradition cultural expressions' (TCE). The former was enacted for meeting India's commitments as a party to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD), while the latter provides a legal regime for protecting the rights of the producers of new varieties of plants, which is in keeping with the country's commitments to the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) under the WTO. Concurrently, the issues were taken up in the WIPO by the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, IGC.
