Whither Patent Litigation in India?

Patent litigation in India is growing. Awareness about patents and the possibility of commercial exploitation of patents is increasing. This is due to better laws and improving registration facilities. Indian firms are taking the patent disputes to courts, as was and is very common in the United States. More than a century back, disputes about electric bulb, telephone and automobile have been resolved in the American courts. Indian courts never had as much patent litigation as the American and English courts had. In the last ten years or so, things have changed. Post-WTO, Indian law has been amended and patent protection has become stronger. Patent law and protection provided by it is being increasingly used as a potent tool in competitive strategy formulated by many companies. The courts are playing a very important role in ultimately resolving the disputes and interpreting the law. There is, however, a need to expedite the process of resolution of such disputes.

Medical Negligence: Law and Interpretation

Negligence by doctors has to be determined by judges who are not trained in medical science. They rely on experts’ opinion and decide on the basis of basic principles of reasonableness and prudence. This brings into a lot of subjectivity into the decision and the effort is to reduce it and have certain objective criteria. This may sound simple but is tremendously difficult as medical profession evolves and experimentation helps in its evolution. Thus, there is a constant tussle between the established procedures and innovative methods. But, innovation simply for the sake of being different, without any reason is not acceptable. And, these issues make it extremely challenging to decide negligence by doctors. The paper examines the concept of negligence in medical profession in the light of interpretation of law by the Supreme Court of India and the idea of the ‘reasonable man’.

Can Businesses in India ever resolve Disputes Speedily and Effectively?

Business disputes are like cancer which should be stopped from spreading as soon as possible. Litigation is the least favoured method of resolution for a variety of reasons – delay being the foremost. Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) methods like negotiation, mediation, conciliation, arbitration are currently in vogue. Unfortunately, there is a strong feeling in India that extra-legal methods provide timely solutions for business disputes. This does not augur well for the business environment. The paper examines the business dispute resolution scenario in India and provides suggestions for making it more speedy and effective in a legal manner.

Role of Alternative Dispute Resolution Methods in Development of Society: `Lok Adalat ’ in India

Peace is the sine qua non for development. Disputes and conflicts dissipate valuable time, effort and money of the society. It is of utmost importance that there should not be any conflict in the society. But, in a realistic sense, this is not possible. So, the next best solution is that any conflict which raises its head is nipped in the bud. With the judicial system in most of the countries being burdened with cases, any new case takes a long time to be decided. And, till the time the final decision comes, there is a state of uncertainty, which makes any activity almost impossible. Commerce, business, development work, administration, etc., all suffer because of long time taken in resolving disputes through litigation. To get out of this maze of litigation, courts and lawyers’ chambers; most of the countries encourage alternative methods of dispute resolution. India has a long tradition and history of such methods being practiced in the society at grass roots level. These are called panchayat and in the legal terminology, these are called arbitration. These are widely used in India for resolution of disputes – both commercial and non-commercial. Other alternative methods being used are Lok Adalat (People’s Court), where justice is dispensed summarily without too much emphasis on legal technicalities. Methods like negotiation, mediation and conciliation are being increasingly used to resolve disputes instead of going for litigation. There have been recent amendments in the procedural law of India to incorporate these methods so that people get justice in a speedy manner and there is lesser conflict in the society. This paper examines the role of methods of alternative dispute resolution, particularly Lok Adalat in making inexpensive, efficacious and speedy justice accessible to the public. The Constitution of India guarantees ‘Right to Constitutional Remedies’ as a fundamental right. The government provides free legal aid to the needy. However, in a country of continental dimensions and with population more than a billion, it becomes very difficult to provide free legal aid to everyone. The National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) is trying to spread ‘legal literacy’ which is a step more than ‘literacy’. People care about their rights much more when they are aware and are ‘legal literate’. Efforts are also being done at provincial level. The paper particularly examines the role of NALSA and other State Legal Services Authority which are the key institutions in bridging the gap between public and judicial system. The author has personal experiences regarding the same. All these efforts seem to be a small drop in the ocean, but small drops make mighty oceans. How can these be replicated in other parts of India and similar models developed and adopted in Asia-Pacific countries is a good research area. Such models shall curb conflicts and bring more peace in society – not only in domestic sense but also internationally.

Party Autonomy in International Commercial Arbitration

As global business expands, the number of business disputes is also on the rise. It is extremely difficult or rather impossible to get all these disputes resolved through the conventional method of courts. Moreover, for international business disputes issues of jurisdiction, law, language, culture, etc. pose additional problems. As the courts all over the world are loaded with unresolved cases, delay in getting justice is inevitable. In such a scenario, businesses have to search new methods of resolution of business disputes and arbitration is one of them. Arbitration is a private court by a private judge. The decision of the arbitrator is called an award, which is binding on the parties. When the business dispute is international in character and is to be resolved with the help of arbitration, it is known as ‘international commercial arbitration.’ The arbitration is a creation of contract between the parties. Hence, party autonomy is the heart and soul of each and every arbitration contract. However, this autonomy is not unbridled. The applicable law and public policy provide the boundaries to this autonomy. Rules of arbitral institutions also curtail the autonomy of parties. This research focuses on a catena of judgments of various courts, primarily the U.S. Supreme Court, the House of Lords and the Supreme Court of India in determining the trend towards acknowledging party autonomy as one of the most important aspects of international commercial arbitration. It shall also look into related issues dealt by the New York Convention and the UNCITRAL (United Nations Commission on International Trade Law) Model Law.

`Commerciality` in International Commercial Arbitration

Enterprises, the world over, now conduct business on a dramatically more international scale. The growth of world economies is directly connected with millions of commercial contracts, which are becoming more international in character owing to global integration. Commercial arbitration has been hailed as the most efficient form of dispute settlement available to participants in international trade. As the purpose of the commercial arbitration is to resolve commercial disputes, often issues have been raised whether a particular dispute is commercial or not. With globalisation and seamless trade the aspirations of global business community, it would be of immense importance to understand the meaning of ‘commercial’ as construed in ‘international commercial arbitration’ in some of the major jurisdictions of the world.

Implementing a Public Private Partnership Model for Managing Urban Health in Ahmedabad

Governments in many developing countries acknowledge they are facing difficulties in their attempt to meet the basic health needs of their populations. They rely on contracting out to private (for-profit and not-for-profit) organizations as a strategy to meet the needs of underserved populations. For the most part, the public sector chooses to contract out primary healthcare services to the private sector to expand access, increase the availability of medicines and medical supplies, and improve the quality of care. In both urban and rural settings, private for-profit and non-profit health service providers serve both the rich and the poor. Communities often recognize private sector healthcare providers to be more responsive to their healthcare needs and preferences in terms of services available, suitable timings and geographical access etc. Private sector has always played a significant role in the delivery of health services in developing countries. Public-private-partnership (PPP) is an approach under which services are delivered by the private sector, while the responsibility for providing the resources rests with the government. Establishing a PPP requires a legal framework acceptable to all the partners, clarity on the commitment of resources, roles and responsibilities of each partner, as well as accountability to provide a given set of services at a desired level of quality and affordable user charges. Formalizing such an arrangement between partners requires conceptualising a framework for Public Private Partnership (PPP) to manage the delivery of health services. In this paper, we describe the design, development and implementation of a PPP for managing urban health services in Ahmedabad city, Gujarat. Our model has succeeded in bringing together compatible public and private partners to plan and deliver quality healthcare services to meet the community needs of Vasna ward, in Ahmedabad. The new Vasna Urban Health centre was inaugurated on July 23, by the Chief Minister of Guajarat. This new centre now serves about 120 outpatients everyday as against an average of 10 outpatients daily earlier.

Resummed transverse momentum distribution of pseudo-scalar Higgs boson at NNLOA_A+NNLL

In this article we have studied the transverse momentum distribution of the pseudo-scalar Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The small \pt region which provides the bulk of the cross section is not accessible to fixed order perturbation theory due to the presence of large logarithms in the series. Using the universal infrared behaviour of the QCD we resum these large logarithms up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy. We observe a significant reduction in theoretical uncertainties due to the unphysical scales at NNLL level compared to the previous order. We present the $p_T$ distribution matched to NNLO$_A$+NNLL, valid for the whole $p_T$ region and provide a detailed phenomenological study in the context of both 14 TeV and 13 TeV LHC using different choices of masses, scales and parton distribution functions which will be useful for the search of such particle at the LHC in near future.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

Mean platelet volume as short-term follow-up biomarker in children with celiac disease

Objective: To assess the mean platelet volume (MPV) as a short-term follow-up biomarker in celiac disease (CD) and to compare it with anti-tissue transglutaminase antibody (TTGA) assay in Indian children. Material and Methods: Newly diagnosed 35 children aged <12 years who were positive for TTGA and further confirmed by intestinal biopsy with histological Grade 2 and 3 based on modified Marsh Classification were enrolled. TTGA, MPV, and clinical parameters were assessed at enrollment and after 3 months of gluten free diet (GFD). Results: Short stature (94.3%) and diarrhea (80%) were the most common presenting features. 33 (94.3%) children were found to have anemia. MPV reduced significantly from 9.28±1.88 fl to 8.55±1.10 fl after 3 months of GFD, (p<0.001). The mean TTG level reduced from 166.80±59.23 U/ml to 86.45±39.67 U/ml (p<0.001) after 3 months of GFD. Conclusion: MPV is one of the biomarkers that can be used to monitor dietary transgressions in CD in short term

Di-jet production at the LHC through unparticles

We report the phenomenological impact of unparticles in the production of di-jet at the LHC. We compute the scalar, spin-1 and spin-2 unparticle contributions to the dijet cross sections and present our results in different kinematical distributions. We find that the scalar unparticle contribution is dominant over that of the spin-1 and spin-2 unparticles for the same coupling values.Comment: 17 pages, 10 eps figures, 4 tables. Spin-1 unparticles also included. This version to appear in PR