The country’s claims to its geographical indicative products – like hilsa fish, aroma chinigura rice, kanchagolla sweets – will be protected from now on after the country passed a law to protect its indigenous goods.
The bill titled Geographical Indicative Products (Registration and Protection) Act 2013 passed in the parliament on Tuesday, after being initially tabled by Industries Minister Dilip Barua on October 27, with an aim to safeguard the patent rights of the country’s centuries-old indigenous products.
The act would protect the country’s claims to commodities such as hilsa fish, jamdani saree, nakshi kantha, pineapple, and fazli mango, said Jamal Abdul Naser Chowdhury, registrar of the Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (DPDT).
“Now we will formulate the necessary rules to make the newly formulated act functional, which will take three or four more months,” said Jamal, who will also oversee the implementation of the act.
According to the act, geographical indications (GI) is a sign which defines the source and contains the goodwill of a product that originated in a particular area, like hilsha from Padma, chamcham from Tangail and kanchagolla from Natore.
The objective of introducing the act was to protect the interest of the producers by using a particular sign through registering.
Earlier, Bangladesh formulated an ordinance named Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Ordinance 2008, which identified 66 products as the country’s GI products.
However, indigenous products like jamdani saree, fazli mango and nakshi kantha have already been registered as geographical indicative products of India.
According to the Geographical Indications Registry of India, nakshi kantha was registered as a GI product in 2008, while fazli mango and jamdani saree were registered in 2009.
The registry also said Uppada jamdani saree was a handicraft item produced in Andhra Pradesh state, nakshi kantha in West Bengal and fazli mango was grown in the Maldah district of West Bengal.
“The country has already lost its famous products like jamdani, nakshi kantha and fazli Mango because of not having the act in due time,” said Farida Akhter, director of Probortona, a company selling local handloom products.
However, Jamal Abdul Naser Chowdhury assured that India’s registration would not be a problem as the origin names of the products were different.
“India called its jamdani saree as Uppada jamdani and we the Bangladeshis call our jamdani as Dhakai jamdani; the Bangladeshi fazli mango will be Rajshahi fazli mango, while the Indian fazli mango is called Maldah fazli mango,” he added.
The initiative has been taken in line with the Agreement of Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which Bangladesh signed on January 1, 1995.
As per the act, a separate unit will be formed under the Department of Patent, Design and Trademark to operate on works related to the GI products.
The unit will conserve a detailed list of the GI products from across the country as a primary database of the local products.
To register a product, the association or the co-operative for a product will have to apply; no one individual can register a product, according to the act.
The validity of a particular registered geographical indication product will remain for five years. The producer would have to apply for re-registering after the validity expires.
Any person or organization will be punished with three years of imprisonment and Tk200,000 fine for producing, transporting, storing and selling of a particular geographical indication product by providing false and fabricated information.
Similar punishment will be charged for marketing of a particular registered product which had expired its validity, and for breaching the conditions of the registration as a geographically indicative product.
Meanwhile, the decision taken earlier this June by World Trade Organisation’s council for TRIPS to extend the transition period for the least developed countries for a further eight years until July 01, 2021 – will give the government some cushion to implement the GI law.
