Patenting of Nanotechnology Inventions: Analyzing Section 3 of Indian Patent Act, 1970

Recently there has been a perception, especially amongst the foreign multinational pharmaceutical companies that Indian Patent Act doesn’t provide the adequate protection to inventions. Their belief basically flows from the fact that while inventions are patentable in developed jurisdictions like USA, Japan, European Union, etc but when it comes to secure the same inventions in India they become non-patentable. This raises questions like ‘Is Indian Patent law unnecessarily rigid and narrows down the patentability of inventions’ and whether it is compliant to the TRIPS agreement. Taking the judgment in the Novartis case as base and looking forward to the future inventions technology like nanotechnology, the author tries to analyse these question.