Piyush Goyal, Commerce and industry Minister, Govt. of India said that intellectual property rights (TRIPS) waiver for five years agreed in the recently concluded WTO meet will help developing countries manufacture patented COVID vaccines to deal with the pandemic.

Under this, a country will be able to issue a compulsory licence to its domestic pharma firms to make that vaccine without taking approval from the original maker. Besides, it was also decided to permit export of those vaccines.

Goyal said that India already has a number of COVID vaccines and can help other developing countries to make vaccines. "India has sufficient vaccine manufacturing and technology to meet the needs of not only India but that of other parts of the world. We supported the TRIPS waiver at @WTO to enable less developed countries become Aatmanirbhar in vaccines," Goyal tweeted. 

Members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) last week agreed to grant a temporary patent waiver for manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines for five years.

However, talks on including therapeutics and diagnostics, as proposed by India and South Africa, under the purview of this waiver would start after six months, he added.

He also said that India has fully protected the interests of farmers and fishermen. "We did not come under any pressure. We are known as deal makers and not deal breakers...We stick to our issues...Indian farmers are fully protected," he added.

Goyal said India has emerged as the voice of the Developing and Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in the recently concluded 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) of the WTO in Geneva.

“In fact, a statement also has emerged out of WTO after seven years,” said Goyal, a day after returning from the Europe visit. “Almost every WTO decision bears India’s signature, India is seen leading from the front and India’s concerns are visible prominently in the outcome documents. We have been cent percent successful in stating our point of view, getting our agenda approved at the talks,” he added.

Goyal said we neither came under any pressure, nor buckled under pressure at any time. Far from being initially projected as a ‘Deal Breaker’ by certain countries, India finally emerged as a ‘Deal Maker’ at the WTO talks, he said.

“In fact, few countries stated that India was not allowing any agreement. Reality was very different! The reality was that a few countries created hurdles towards agreement with the vain hope that they could rope in India later, make India hop the bandwagon and that India’s voice is lost in the din,” he said.