NEW DELHI: The man who has been appointed the chief economic adviser to the government of India, Arvind Subramanian , was until recently urging the US to initiate disputes against India before the World Trade Organization.He also sought changes in provisions within Indian patent law aimed at preventing frivolous patenting and preventing pharmaceutical companies from getting extensions on patents by tweaking existing drugs and passing them off as innovations.Subramanian was a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and at the Center for Global Development . As recently as March this year, in a written testimony submitted during the process of review by the US of intellectual property (IP) protection of various countries including India, Subramanian wrote, “If India does not address the problems created by Section 3(d) of the patent legislation or by compulsory licensing for nonworking, the United States should consider initiating WTO disputes against India.”He justified this approach on the ground that India took its WTO obligations seriously and had a good track record of implementing WTO dispute settlement rulings. He added that for the US, “the virtue of using WTO dispute settlement was that it would be diplomatically and politically less confrontational than unilateral and bilateral actions”.Subramanian was reiterating a position he had taken in an earlier testimony to the US Congress in March last year.Every year the US brings out a report, under section 301 of its Trade Act, which categorizes countries according to their level of intellectual property protection. If a country’s protection level is deemed inadequate, it is categorized as a priority foreign country (PFC), a situation that could lead to US trade sanctions if not resolved within 6 months.The legality of such a unilateral action has been questioned under the WTO, though industrial lobbies in the US have been asking the US government to place India in the PFC category. However, the US stopped short of placing India in this category in its report earlier this year.Instead, the US said there would be an out-of-cycle review of India’s patent protection measures. Currently, the US is inviting submissions for the out-of-cycle review that is happening now.The fact that the person who is chief economic adviser has held positions that completely contradict India’s stance on patents has been a matter of concern among those arguing in favour of the provisions for protection of public health within India’s patent laws.In the same testimony before the congressional committee reviewing India’s level of patent protection, Subramanian recommended that “India could consider eliminating the additional efficacy requirement for patentability in Section 3 (d) of its patent law” and that “India could commit to a stay on government-initiated compulsory licences”.These recommendations are in line with the demands of the US pharmaceutical industry, which has been lobbying against compulsory licencing and demanding the dilution of section 3(d) of the Indian patent law, though India insists it is well within the flexibilities allowed under the WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Properties (TRIPS) Agreement.