Impact of Awareness Programmes and Capacity Building in Farmers’ Plant Variety Registration under the PPV&FR Act

Abstract

<span style="font-size:9.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:" times="" new="" roman";mso-bidi-font-style:="" italic"="" lang="EN-GB">Indian plant variety protection law is unique as it simultaneously aims to protect plant breeders as well as farmers. In the initial years of law implementation, the progress with respect to registration of farmers’ varieties was not only slow but also inconsistent, and the trend was erratic. The receipt of applications for Plant Genome Saviour Awards was also meagre due to non-awareness among the farming community in the agro-biodiversity rich regions. Planned awareness programmes in collaboration with National Agricultural Research System (NARS), non-government organizations (NGOs) and Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs, Farm Science Centres) throughout the country resulted in the receipt of more number of applications for farmers’ varieties registration and also for awards indicating that the training programmes, national dialogues on farmers rights, exhibitions and publications in local newspapers play an important role in confidence building and clearing misconceptions about filing for intellectual property rights. Organization of a large number of capacity building programmes to both trainers and farmers in the agro-biodiversity rich regions is a very good strategy to attract more farmers/farming communities to file applications both for registration of farmers’ varieties and the Genome Saviour Awards.

</span>