Amending India’s Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act

India has commenced a process to amend its intellectual property (IP) law on agricultural and horticultural crop varieties, plant breeding and farmers’ rights - the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act (PPV&FR) Act. The Act was originally legislated by the Indian Parliament on 30 October 2001 in compliance with the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The law came into force in two phases, with a first set of sections applicable from 11 November 2005 and the second set of remaining provisions operational from 19 October 2006. 

The key justification given for the proposed amendments is that after twenty years of the law in force, the difficulties in implementation need to be addressed. Officials also explain the need for clarity on some of the legal provisions. The law has previously been amended only once in 2021. 

The head office of the PPV&FR Authority was established at New Delhi in 2005. It has since set up five regional offices operating in Guwahati, Palampur, Pune, Ranchi and Shivamogga. The Authority grants IP on 206 categories of new and extant plant varieties. An application for registration of IP once approved is granted a plant variety certificate (PVC). ‘Registration’ under the PPV&FR Act confers exclusive rights on a plant breeder to produce, sell, market, distribute, import or export the variety for a period of 15 years for crops and 18 years for trees/vines. 

The Authority has set up a committee to ‘examine the Act and Rules to suggest amendments’. The said committee was approved at the 39^th meeting of the Authority held on 3 December 2024. The twelve-member committee is chaired by the retired Secretary of the Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE) of the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare (MoA&FW) also the former Director General, ICAR Dr R S Paroda. It represents a wide cross-section of interest groups, including the seed industry. 

Stakeholder consultations have been held in hybrid mode through end October 2025 with representatives from the seed industry, public sector and farmers groups at the Plant Authority Bhawan at New Delhi. Based on the feedback received from the consultations, the committee will make suggestions for amendments to MoA&FW. 

When the law was first passed it was presented as India’s unique answer to a world being acculturated to WTO norms of IP in agriculture where farmers’ innovation was neither recognised nor recompensed. The uniqueness of India’s IP law is that it recognises farmers too as breeders, providing the option for IP on their varieties too. The efforts of the Authority have been to get more farmers to register and bring their varieties into the IP regime. Many farmers opposed to the very idea of exclusive property rights on plants have stayed away from such IP registration. Some instead seek institutional support through a non-IP approach, sans having to register for PVCs. Some argue that varieties held and used as a common biocultural heritage ought not to be attributable to a singular farmer’s innovation as a claim for IP. 

As per information on the PPV&FR Authority web site, 10,018 PVCs have been granted as of 31 October 2025. Out of these 5,038 have been granted to farmers’ varieties (FVs). The Authority highlights the fact that IP granted on FVs are little over 50 per cent of all IP registrations so far. 

Yet, two qualitative facts must be borne in mind. Firstly, these FVs are registered under the ‘extant’ (or existing) category and not under the ‘new’ category. If on-farm R&D and variety development by farmer breeders is not systematically supported, after all existing FVs in the country have been registered, a decline in registration of FVs can be foreseen. 

Secondly, those farmers with a PVC have little institutional support from the national agricultural system and public sector institutes for the mainstreaming of their local crop varieties. Mere IP-protection does not automatically make their varieties available in the seed market. That requires including them in the state variety release committees, organising their multiplication, packaging, labelling and marketing. As India seeks both nutritional security and climate resilience for its agri food systems, support for FVs will become even more important. 

Meanwhile, the formal seed industry remains the dominant supplier of IP-protected varieties. The pro-IP seed industry represented by the Federation of Seed Industry of India and their sub-licensees – the National Seed Association of India, have been repeatedly asking for pro-industry amendments of the law, including a ‘One Nation One License’ regulatory regime. This for ease of doing agribusiness, converging the different legal requirements under three laws, namely the PPV&FR Act, the Seed Act and the Biological Diversity Act. 

To stay uniquely pro-farmer in times when IP maximalist forces dominate will be the true test of this amendment process. 

 (Shalini is an independent law and policy analyst. She has been tracking IP rules in agriculture since the WTO came into force in 1995)