• The topic covered was “Intellectual Property Rights and Atmanirbhar Bharat”
• “Avoiding plagiarism, original research should  be taken seriously”: Joint Secretary Raghavender GR

Department of Political Science and Government & Public Administration at LPU organised a virtual interactive webinar on the topic “Intellectual Property Rights and Atmanirbhar Bharat”. The resource person was Joint secretary Raghavender GR from the Department of Justice, Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India. A large number of LPU students and faculty members and of other institutions as well participated to imbibe the sound suggestions and predictions made on the innovation and research-related topic.

Civil Servant from Central Secretariat Service (CSS) 1988; Mr Raghavender GR is very passionate about ‘Intellectual Property Rights ’, especially Copyright and related rights. He has worked as Registrar of Copyrights of the Indian Copyright Office for many years and played a key role in the introduction of amendments to the Copyright Act and Rules. He also initiated online registration for copyright along with payment gateway and digitisation of documents. He is of the opinion that resources like intellectual property rights are reasons behind the creation of a successful brand. The rights of a legally protected copyrighted work can be transferred and assigned from one person or entity to another

Explaining intensely on the topic of the day, Raghavender GR talked about how to commercialize copyrights and patents.  He postulated that ‘Plagiarism’ is an important issue in this regard, and it is to be debated all around. He also stressed that original research needs to be taken seriously. Elaborating on various dimensions of the topic, he discussed the challenges that India is currently facing, when it comes to patent and copyright laws. He also elaborated that it was the British who introduced the patent laws in India, and these continued in the post-independence era.

It was also shared that the copyright is awarded to someone for the artistic creation of his/her unique intellectualism. Thus, a copyrighted work provides exclusive rights of ownership to its creator. Such work takes a creative effort, hard work, being complemented with a lot of research to create something new. Once innovation is done, the creator deserves to commercialize it and reap the fruits of his/her creatively intellectual mind. The creator can realize the true potential of this intellectual property only by commercializing it in the market.

While concluding, Jt Sect Raghavender talked about how India is working at the national level to make the country self-reliant and innovatively creative through different programmes like “atmanirbhar bharat”. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, PM Narendra Modi, did announce a special economic package of many lakh crores of rupees under Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan, with an aim to make the country independent and combating the competition in the global market. LPU’s Executive Dean Dr. Sanjay Modi; HoD Prof Dr Kirandeep Singh; Prof Dr Vinod CV; Prof Dr Manvendra Singh, Prof Dr Manish Verma and thousands of others attended the webinar arranged by LPU’s School of Humanities.