Every other right in the intellectual property family has an owner who can point to the right, price it, license it and sell it. A geographical indication under the Geographical Indications Act 1999 has none of those things. The registered proprietor of the Darjeeling indication, the Tea Board of India, does not grow a single bush of the tea the registration protects. The weavers, growers and distillers whose work gives a registered name its value hold no right at all merely by being producers in the right place: their names must appear in a second register, the register of authorised users, before the statute gives them anything. And the indication itself cannot be assigned, licensed, pledged or mortgaged by anyone, because Parliament designed it as a collective right anchored to a territory rather than as an asset anchored to a balance sheet.

That design is the point on which almost every popular account of the GI tag goes wrong, and it is the point this article exists to get right. Registration of a geographical indication protects a name. Whether it protects a producer depends on a second, separate administrative step that most producers in most registered regions have never taken, and the distance between the size of the register of indications and the size of the register of authorised users is the single most informative fact about how this statute has worked in practice. The article works through the Act in the order a reader needs it: what qualifies, who may apply, what the two registers do, what rights registration confers and on whom, where infringement begins, why the right cannot be sold, how it collides with trade mark law, and what the enforcement and benefit record shows. The claim to hold on to throughout is the one the statute’s own structure proves: registration protects the name and not the producer.

What the law had to work with before the Act

Before September 2003, an Indian producer whose regional name was being misused had no statute written for the purpose and had to borrow remedies from neighbouring fields of law. The principal remedy was the action for passing off, the common law action that restrains a trader from selling goods as though they were the goods of another. Passing off could and did protect regional reputations: a seller of sparkling wine made far from France, or of tea grown far from Darjeeling, could in principle be restrained where buyers were deceived. But passing off is an expensive, evidence-heavy remedy that has to be rebuilt in every case. The claimant must prove the reputation, prove the misrepresentation and prove the damage, defendant by defendant and market by market, and the protection it gives lasts only as long as the litigation budget does. For a dispersed body of small producers, none of whom individually owns the regional name, the action was structurally mismatched to the problem: the reputation was collective, the harm was collective, and the remedy belonged to whoever could afford to sue.

The trade mark system offered a second borrowed instrument. Under the trade mark legislation that preceded the Trade Marks Act 1999, and under that Act itself, a name associated with a region could be protected as a certification trade mark, a mark whose owner certifies that goods bearing it possess a stated origin, material, mode of manufacture or quality, or as a collective mark of an association. The Tea Board used exactly this route for Darjeeling, registering the word and the logo as certification marks in India and in several foreign jurisdictions years before any GI statute existed. Certification marks worked, and in the Darjeeling system they still do much of the operational work. But they fit awkwardly. A certification mark is a trade mark, owned as property, administered through the trade mark registry’s logic of proprietors and users, and it protects the certification system the owner runs rather than the geographical link itself. It also leaves the entitlement question to the owner’s regulations: whoever the certifier licenses may use the mark, and the statute has nothing to say about which producers have a claim to be inside the system.

One feature of the certification mark model did pass into the GI design and deserves notice, because it explains the Darjeeling proprietor’s shape. Certification mark law is built on the separation of the certifier from the trade: the proprietor of a certification mark certifies the goods of others and is expected not to trade in the certified goods itself, so that the certifier has no commercial interest in relaxing the standard. The Tea Board fits that template naturally, a statutory regulator of an industry rather than a seller in it. The 1999 Act generalised the template: its proprietor is characteristically an institution that administers rather than produces, and the registered proprietors of the register, boards, corporations, authorities and associations, are selected by Section 11’s representative requirement from the class of bodies that can plausibly hold a name for others. The GI proprietor’s non trading character is therefore not an accident of the Darjeeling file; it is the inherited logic of certification, written into a registration statute.

International law supplied the obligation, and the pressure, to do better. The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property had long treated indications of source and appellations of origin as objects of industrial property, and had required members to seize goods bearing false indications of source on importation. India stood outside the Lisbon Agreement, the treaty that created an international registration system for appellations of origin, so Paris gave principles without machinery. The Paris inheritance deserves one more detail, because Section 22’s drafting carries it visibly. Article 10bis of the Paris Convention defined unfair competition as acts contrary to honest practices in industrial or commercial matters, and instanced acts creating confusion with another’s establishment or goods, false allegations discrediting a competitor, and indications liable to mislead the public as to the nature, manufacturing process, characteristics, suitability or quantity of goods. The Explanation to Section 22 of the 1999 Act reproduces that catalogue almost exactly as the content of its unfair competition limb, so that the Indian infringement provision is, in one limb, the Paris standard given a register and a plaintiff. The lineage explains the limb’s breadth: it is not confined to use of the registered name as such, but reaches competitive conduct that trades on origin confusion in any of the Paris forms, which is why the section catches the trader who never prints the registered indication on the pack but builds the same deception from the surrounding presentation.

The machinery arrived with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, the TRIPS Agreement, whose Articles 22 to 24 required every member of the World Trade Organization to provide legal means for preventing the use of geographical indications that mislead the public or constitute unfair competition, and a higher tier of protection for wines and spirits. India, which had products whose names were being used freely abroad and which pressed in the TRIPS negotiations for the higher tier to be extended beyond wines and spirits to products such as basmati rice and Darjeeling tea, had both a duty and an interest in legislating. The 1999 Act is the legislation that resulted, and its shape, a registration statute built around a collective entitlement, reflects the Indian negotiating position as much as the TRIPS minimum: the statute protects the indication because the place made the product’s reputation, and it distributes the resulting rights across the producers of the place rather than to the first trader to file.

The political trigger for the legislation is usually told through three famous fights, and the telling usually gets the law wrong. In the middle of the 1990s the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent on the use of turmeric in wound healing, a use documented in Indian practice for generations; the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research challenged the grant with documentary evidence of prior knowledge, and the patent was revoked in 1997. A European patent on the fungicidal use of neem, granted to a foreign corporation and the United States Department of Agriculture, was revoked by the European Patent Office in 2000 after a celebrated opposition, and the revocation survived appeal. A Texas company, RiceTec, obtained a United States patent in 1997 on rice lines it called basmati, and on re-examination most of its claims were withdrawn or rejected, leaving a narrow patent on specific breeding lines and the name controversy unresolved. All three were patent revocations or patent narrowings. None of them was a geographical indication dispute: no GI right existed to be infringed, no register was involved, and the legal question in each was whether a patent should have been granted at all, which is a question about novelty and prior knowledge. The distinction matters because the remedy India built in response had two separate parts. The traditional knowledge part, the documentation of prior knowledge so that patent examiners can find it, belongs to instruments such as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library and to the plant varieties and traditional knowledge framework discussed in the article on the Seeds Act and plant varieties protection. The name part, the protection of Darjeeling and Basmati as indications of origin, is the part the 1999 Act was written to supply. Conflating the two produces the common error of treating every traditional knowledge controversy as a GI case and then wondering why the GI register did not prevent it.

The Geographical Indications Act 1999 in outline

The statute is the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999, Act 48 of 1999. It received the assent of the President on 30 December 1999, but like several statutes of its generation it waited for its machinery: it was brought into force on 15 September 2003, by notification S.O. 1051(E), on the same day as the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Rules, 2002, which supply the procedural detail. The choice of a separate, purpose-built statute, a sui generis law in the language of the field, rather than an additional chapter in the Trade Marks Act, was itself a statement about the nature of the right, and the wider field within which that choice sits, the family of Indian intellectual property statutes and the treaty obligations beneath them, is mapped in the guide to intellectual property law in India.

The administrative design is compact. The Controller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks is, by Section 3, the Registrar of Geographical Indications. The Geographical Indications Registry established by Section 5 has its head office at Chennai, and the Register of Geographical Indications is kept there under Section 6. Applications are filed in the Registry office within whose territorial limits the territory concerned is situated, which distributes the filing work while keeping a single national register. The Act then follows the life of a right in its chapter order: definitions; the register and the conditions for registration; the procedure for and duration of registration; the effect of registration; special provisions relating to trade marks and prior users; rectification; appeals; offences; and the miscellaneous provisions, including the treatment of convention countries and the reciprocity rule under which nationals of a country that denies Indians equivalent rights may themselves be denied registration. Foreign indications are registrable in India on the same structural terms as Indian ones, and the register in practice carries foreign names, among them wines, spirits and cheeses of European origin, alongside the much larger body of Indian registrations.

Two features of the outline deserve emphasis before the detail begins, because they organise everything that follows. The first is that the Act creates rights through registration and withholds its central remedy from the unregistered: Section 20 bars any proceeding for infringement of an unregistered geographical indication, while expressly preserving the older passing off action. Registration is therefore not, as in copyright, a formality laid over a right that already exists; it is the act that brings the statutory right into being, and the pre-2003 world of passing off survives only as a preserved common law annex. The second is that the Act splits the entitlement in two. The registration of the indication and the registration of its users are separate entries in separate parts of the same register, made on separate applications, and the rights the Act confers are allocated by reference to both. A statute can be understood by its definitions, but this one is understood by its register.

What qualifies: the definition taken apart

Section 2(1)(e) carries the whole statute, and it rewards slow reading. In the words of the Act, a geographical indication, in relation to goods, means an indication which identifies such goods as agricultural goods, natural goods or manufactured goods as originating, or manufactured in the territory of a country, or a region or locality in that territory, where a given quality, reputation or other characteristic of such goods is essentially attributable to its geographical origin; and where the goods are manufactured goods, one of the activities of either the production or of processing or preparation of the goods concerned takes place in such territory, region or locality. Four elements do the work in that sentence, and a failure on any one of them is fatal to an application.

The first element is the sign itself. Section 2(1)(g) defines an indication to include any name, geographical or figurative representation or any combination of them conveying or suggesting the geographical origin of goods to which it applies. The sign need not be words alone: a device, a logo or a pictorial representation that conveys origin qualifies, which is why the Darjeeling registration could cover both the word and the well-known logo of a woman holding tea leaves. The second element is the goods. Section 2(1)(f) provides that goods means any goods and includes goods of handicraft or of industry, and foodstuff. The definition clause speaks of agricultural, natural and manufactured goods, and the register that the Act has produced is dominated by handicrafts and agricultural products, with foodstuffs and some manufactured and natural goods behind them. Services are outside the definition altogether, a limitation whose consequences the Darjeeling litigation would later expose. The third element is the territory: the goods must originate, or be manufactured, in the territory of a country or a region or locality within it, and the registration is made, under Section 8, in respect of particular goods or classes of goods and a definite territory. The territory is not background information; it is part of the right, drawn on a map that the applicant must file.

The fourth element is the link, and it is the element that separates a geographical indication from a mere statement of where something was made. A given quality, a reputation or another characteristic of the goods must be essentially attributable to their geographical origin. Three points in that formulation carry weight. The link may rest on reputation alone: a product whose reputation is essentially attributable to its origin qualifies even if no measurable quality difference can be proved, which is what allows indications for goods whose distinctiveness is cultural and historical as much as physical. The attribution must be essential rather than incidental, so the applicant’s statement of case has to connect the characteristic to the geographical environment, including the natural and human factors the application form calls for, the climate, soil, water and accumulated local skill that the standard account of a registration assembles. And for manufactured goods the Act adds a locational test with a deliberately low threshold: it is enough that one of the activities of production, processing or preparation takes place in the territory, so a manufactured product need not be made from end to end within the boundary, provided the link between origin and characteristic is made out.

Why can a name that is not the name of a place qualify as a geographical indication?

The Explanation to the definition answers this directly: a name that is not the name of a country, region or locality still counts as a geographical indication if it relates to a specific geographical area and is used for particular goods originating there. Traditional product names tied by usage to one area can therefore be registered.

The breadth of the phrase other characteristic should also be marked, because it is where the definition accommodates the register’s actual population. For a foodstuff, the characteristic may be a texture, a keeping quality or a method dependent flavour that buyers recognise without being able to specify. For a handicraft, it may be a weave structure, a vocabulary of motifs, a palette of natural dyes, or the hand of a finishing technique transmitted within the territory’s workshops. For a natural product, it may be a mineral or botanical composition fixed by local geology or flora. The Act does not rank these forms of distinctiveness: the characteristic must be identified in the application, connected to the geographical origin, and shown to be essentially attributable to it, and the evidence offered takes the form the goods dictate, workshop records and craft histories for the weaving town, soil and climate data for the plantation district, geological survey material for the stone or the salt. The definition’s hospitality to reputation, examined above, does much of the remaining work, since for many crafts the characteristic and the reputation are the same fact stated in two vocabularies: the market values the goods because the territory makes them as it does, and the territory’s way of making them is the characteristic the register records.

The distinction between a geographical indication and an ordinary indication of source should be marked, because the two are often confused in examination answers and in commentary. An indication of source merely states where goods come from: made in a stated town, grown in a stated district. It asserts a fact about origin and nothing about why the origin matters. A geographical indication asserts the fact and the consequence together: the goods come from the territory and their quality, reputation or characteristic is essentially attributable to that origin. The Act registers only the second. That is why the applicant’s statement of how the indication designates the goods, which Section 11 requires, is the substantive heart of every application, and why contested applications are, at bottom, arguments about whether the claimed link between product and place is real, a point the Basmati boundary dispute would later put under a microscope.

The model India chose should be distinguished from the stricter appellation of origin of the Lisbon system, since the two are often run together in examination material. An appellation of origin, in the Lisbon formulation, requires that the quality and characteristics of the goods be due exclusively or essentially to the geographical environment, including natural and human factors: a causal standard, with no reputation-only route. The TRIPS definition that Section 2(1)(e) follows is wider in the one respect that matters to the Indian register: a given quality, reputation or other characteristic suffices, in the alternative. A product whose fame is essentially attributable to its origin qualifies on the fame, without laboratory proof of a quality differential. The choice was consequential. India’s candidate products were rich in documented reputation and poor in the standardised quality evidence a stricter system would have demanded, and the reputation route is what allowed the handicraft heavy register of the Act’s first two decades to be built at all. The price of the wider gate is paid in opposition and rectification, where reputation claims are contested on historical evidence rather than measured in a laboratory, and the contested files of the register are mostly arguments about whose history is true.

What the Act refuses to register

Section 9 lists the indications whose registration is prohibited, and the list is best read as a set of defences of the register’s credibility. Registration is barred for an indication the use of which would be likely to deceive or cause confusion; which would be contrary to any law in force; which comprises or contains scandalous or obscene matter; which comprises or contains matter likely to hurt the religious susceptibilities of any class or section of Indian citizens; which would otherwise be disentitled to protection in a court; which is a generic name or indication, in the sense explained below; and which, although literally true as to the territory in which the goods originate, falsely represents to persons that the goods originate in another territory. The last prohibition is subtle and important: it catches the case where a name is accurate about one place but trades on the fame of another, the situation in which a trader labels goods with a genuinely local name that still presents them to buyers as coming from the celebrated region.

The generic name prohibition carries the long-term threat to every registration, and the Act defines it with care. By the first Explanation to Section 9, a generic name or indication means the name of goods which, although relating to the place where the goods were originally produced, has lost its original meaning and has become the common name of such goods, serving in common parlance as the generic name or description of the category, its nature, type or other characteristic. A geographical name that degenerates into the name of a kind of product is no longer an indication of origin at all, and the second Explanation directs attention to the situation in the region of origin and the region of consumption, the area of production and the quantity produced or consumed, when deciding whether a name has become generic. The history of food names is full of terms that crossed this line in at least some markets, and the cheese and sausage names of Europe are the standard illustrations in the literature. The practical consequence for Indian proprietors is that a registration is not a permanent victory: the name must be policed in the markets where it sells, because a name that the trade and the public come to use as a category word can be lost to genericide even while it sits on the register at home.

The remaining prohibitions repay a slower pass, because each answers a failure mode observed in other registration systems. The deception bar in clause (a) of Section 9 is the register’s consumer protection core: an indication that would be likely to deceive or cause confusion is refused at the threshold rather than left to infringement proceedings. The religious susceptibilities bar in clause (d) is distinctively Indian, reflecting the use of deity and temple names in the food and craft trades. Clause (e), the disentitlement bar, imports the court’s own standards into the registry: an indication that no court would protect cannot be registered merely because no opponent appeared. And clause (g), the falsely representing bar, as it may be called, handles the trader whose goods genuinely come from a place with a famous sounding name and whose labels are drafted to harvest the fame of a different place with the same or a similar name. Read together, the Section 9 bars say that the register will accept only indications whose use is honest in both directions: honest about where the goods come from, and honest in not borrowing the reputation of somewhere else.

Section 10 deals with the case of identical names for different places, the homonymous indication. Where a name is homonymous, the Registrar may register it for goods from the second territory where satisfied that conditions can be imposed that differentiate the two, having regard to the need to ensure equitable treatment of the producers concerned and that consumers are not misled. Homonymy is familiar in the wine world, where the same place name occurs in more than one country, and within India the provision, together with the Registrar’s power to register distinct specifications, supplies the intellectual framework for the shared-name settlements examined later in this article: the statute’s instinct, where two territories have honest claims to a name, is coexistence under differentiated conditions rather than the extinction of one claim by the other.

A final limb of Section 9(f) is easy to overlook and matters to the foreign entries on the register. The bar extends to indications which are not, or have ceased to be, protected in their country of origin, or which have fallen into disuse there. A foreign name that its home system does not protect cannot acquire, by the side door of an Indian registration, a monopoly its own producers do not enjoy; and a name abandoned at home cannot be revived as an Indian register entry at the instance of an applicant abroad. The provision is the register’s reciprocity of substance, complementing the reciprocity of procedure in the convention provisions: protection in India tracks protection in the place whose reputation is claimed, so that the Indian register records living geographical rights rather than embalming lapsed ones.

The genericide risk: a name can be lost after it is won

The generic name bar in Section 9 protects the register at entry; the same danger stalks a registration for the whole of its life in the markets where the goods are sold. Genericide is the process by which a geographical name, through unpoliced use, becomes the ordinary word for a kind of product, at which point the name tells buyers what the goods are rather than where they come from, and protection collapses in that market regardless of what any register says. The second Explanation to Section 9 instructs the Registrar to weigh the situation in the region of origin and the region of consumption when judging whether a name has become generic, which is an acknowledgment in the statute itself that a name can be an indication in one market and a category word in another.

Basmati supplies the Indian illustration of the risk in its sharpest form. In the United States market, basmati has long been treated in trade practice as a description of aromatic long grain rice rather than as the name of rice from the Indo-Gangetic belt alone, and American grown aromatic rice has been marketed under names such as Texmati and Kasmati that build on the term. Indian exporters and the Indian state protested the treatment for decades, and the RiceTec patent controversy of the same period showed how a name treated as generic in a foreign market leaves the door open to private claims over the product itself. The European Union, by contrast, treats basmati through its import regime as rice of defined origin, and the divergence between the two markets demonstrates the Explanation’s point: genericness is a fact about a market’s usage, not a fact about the word.

The counter-strategy is continuous and administrative rather than doctrinal, and the Darjeeling record again provides the model. A name survives as an indication where its proprietor registers it in the important markets, opposes applications that would dilute it, licenses or certifies use under discipline, and keeps the product’s specification and the market’s usage aligned. Where the GI Act’s own register cannot reach, foreign GI registers, certification marks and customs recordals carry the work. A proprietor that treats the Indian registration as the end of the task has misunderstood the asset: the registration is the title deed produced in every other forum, and its value is realised only in the forums where the misuse occurs. This is one reason the institutional quality of the proprietor matters so much to outcomes under the Act. A statutory board with an export market to defend will police genericide as a matter of routine; a small society that obtained a registration for a district craft may never learn that the name is being used as a category word in a market it has never entered, and the loss, when it comes, arrives without any proceeding the society could have answered.

The two registers: the structural key to the Act

Section 6 establishes a single Register of Geographical Indications, kept at the head office of the Registry, in which are entered the names of registered geographical indications together with the names, addresses and descriptions of their registered proprietors and registered authorised users, notifications of assignments and transmissions (of which, for reasons Section 24 makes plain, there are in substance none), and such other matters relating to registered indications as may be prescribed. Section 7 then divides the register, and the division is the most consequential drafting decision in the Act. Part A of the register contains the particulars relating to the registration of geographical indications: the indication itself, the goods, the territory, the specification. Part B contains the particulars relating to the registration of authorised users of registered geographical indications: the individual producers, in other words, in whom the Act’s usable rights are vested.

The consequence of the division is that a registration can be complete, celebrated and entirely genuine while conferring an enforceable right on nobody who makes the goods. When a State government announces that its famous product has received the GI tag, what has happened is an entry in Part A. The entry records that the indication is registered and that a proprietor, usually a board, a corporation, a society or an association, is entered against it as registered proprietor. A producer of the goods acquires a statutory right only when that producer’s own name is entered in Part B as an authorised user, on a separate application under Section 17, and the two entries are made in different proceedings, at different times, on different evidence. Commentators who work on the register have a shorthand for the gap: the register of indications and the register of users are two different populations, and the second is a small fraction of the people entitled in principle to be on it.

Who keeps the register of geographical indications, and where is it kept?

The Controller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks is the Registrar of Geographical Indications under Section 3. The Registry’s head office is at Chennai, and the Register, divided into Part A for indications and Part B for authorised users, is kept there under Section 6, with filing offices serving the territories where goods originate.

The two-part structure also explains the allocation of functions that puzzles first-time readers. The proprietor in Part A is a custodian: it holds the registration, maintains the specification, admits users to Part B by supporting or processing their applications, and is the natural plaintiff’s partner in enforcement. The authorised user in Part B is the rights-holder in the market: the authorised user alone has the exclusive right to use the indication and an independent right to obtain relief for infringement. Neither entry substitutes for the other. A proprietor that is not itself a producer cannot use the indication on goods it does not produce, and a producer who is not an authorised user has the reputation of the region behind the goods but no statutory right in the name. The artifact table later in this article sets out the position of each actor in the system, registered, authorised and neither, in a single view.

The proprietor: an applicant that cannot be a lone trader

Section 11 answers the question of who may apply, and the answer excludes the figure at the centre of every other intellectual property statute. An application for registration of a geographical indication may be made by any association of persons or producers or any organisation or authority established by or under any law for the time being in force representing the interest of the producers of the concerned goods. A single producer cannot apply, however large the producer’s share of the region’s output. A trading company cannot apply, however completely it dominates the marketing of the product. A private firm that has built its brand on the regional name cannot convert that brand into a GI registration, because the statute’s premise is that the right being registered belongs to the producing community of the territory and can be applied for only by a body that represents the interest of that community. The registered proprietor, defined by Section 2(1)(n) as the association or organisation entered in the register as proprietor, holds the registration in that representative character.

The register’s population of proprietors shows the provision at work. Statutory authorities hold registrations for the products of their sectors, the Tea Board for Darjeeling tea being the leading example. State corporations and development bodies hold registrations for the handicrafts and foodstuffs of their States: the Odisha Small Industries Corporation, jointly with a confectioners’ association, is the registered proprietor of Odisha Rasagola. Agricultural export and commodity bodies hold registrations for produce, the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority being the proprietor of the Basmati registration. Registered societies and producer associations hold registrations for the crafts and foods of their districts. The pattern is deliberate: the proprietor is an institution with continuity beyond any individual trading life, because the registration it holds has no owner in the proprietary sense and must be administered by a body that can outlast its members.

The contents of the application, set out in Section 11(2), show what the Registrar is being asked to be persuaded of. The application must contain a statement of how the geographical indication serves to designate the goods as originating from the territory in respect of which the quality, reputation or other characteristic is essentially attributable to geographical origin, where that attribution runs exclusively or essentially to the geographical environment with its inherent natural and human factors. It must state the class of goods, be accompanied by a geographical map of the territory, state the appearance of the indication, whether words, a figurative element or a combination, and give particulars of the producers proposed initially to be registered as authorised users where the application asks for their registration together with the indication. The application is therefore a dossier about a product, a place and a community at once, and its most demanding element is the statement of the link: the applicant must assemble the historical, traditional, agro-climatic and human evidence that the goods owe what buyers value in them to the territory, evidence that is argued over in opposition proceedings exactly as a scientific claim would be.

From what date does a registration run: the application or the grant?

A registration runs from the date of the application, not the date of the grant. Under Section 16, once an application has been accepted and registered, the indication and the authorised users proposed with it take their registration from the date the application was made, and certificates of registration issue to the applicant and to those users.

The procedure between application and registration follows the pattern Indian intellectual property practice knows from trade marks, with one difference of emphasis. The Registrar may refuse the application or accept it outright or subject to amendments, modifications, conditions or limitations; an acceptance can be withdrawn before registration if it was made in error or if circumstances have changed; the accepted application is advertised in the Geographical Indications Journal; any person may oppose within three months of the advertisement, extendable by a further month; the applicant files a counter-statement within two months of receiving the opposition, failing which the application is deemed abandoned; and the Registrar decides after hearing the parties where a hearing is sought. Opposition is the forum in which rival territorial claims, genericness objections and earlier trade mark interests are fought out, and the contested Indian registrations, Basmati among them, carry long opposition and appeal histories. The Registrar may also correct and permit amendments of applications, and registration, when it comes, dates back to the application, which is why the register’s effective dates for the pioneer registrations of 2004 and 2005 run from applications filed as the Registry opened its doors.

One further feature of the applicant’s position must be stated, because it qualifies the proprietor’s role in a way the benefit debate returns to. The proprietor is expected, under the registration framework and the specification it files, to operate the discipline of the indication: to maintain the specification of the goods, to admit producers who meet it to the register of authorised users, and to police the name. The Registrar registers the indication and records the users; the ongoing work of inspection, quality maintenance and enforcement is the proprietor’s, funded from the proprietor’s own resources. The statute thus creates a custodian with heavy continuing duties and, as Section 24 will show, denies that custodian the ordinary proprietary tools for funding them.

The dossier: how a registration is actually built

An application under Section 11 succeeds or fails on the quality of an evidentiary dossier, and the dossier’s categories are worth setting out because they explain both the strength of the pioneer registrations and the thinness of the authorised user culture that follows them. The applicant must establish the product’s history in the territory, drawing on gazetteers, trade records, published accounts and the documentary trail of reputation; must establish the territory, by the map and by the administrative and physical description of the area; must establish the link, by agro-climatic, geological, botanical or craft evidence connecting the characteristic buyers value to the natural and human factors of the place; must describe the goods and their specification with enough precision that compliance can be judged; and must name the producers proposed initially to be registered as authorised users, with the particulars the register will carry into Part B. In the Darjeeling application the dossier could draw on a century and a half of garden records and on the Tea Board’s own regulatory history. In a district handicraft application, the dossier may rest on the records of a single society and on oral tradition reduced to writing for the first time, and the Registrar’s examination must price both dossiers by the same statutory standard.

Examination and opposition then test the dossier in the open. The Registrar examines the application for compliance and for the Section 9 bars, may require amendments or impose conditions, accepts or refuses, and advertisement in the Geographical Indications Journal exposes the claim to the world. Opposition is available to any person, and the opponents in contested files have included State governments advancing boundary claims, as in Basmati, trade interests resisting the withdrawal of a name from common use, and holders of earlier trade marks. The proceeding is evidential in character: affidavits, historical documents and expert material on the link are filed on both sides, and the Registrar’s order, appealable first within the system the Act originally provided and after 2021 to the High Court, decides whose evidence of the product place link is stronger. The timelines reflect the stakes. Unopposed applications with clean dossiers have moved to registration within a span of months in some cases, while the Basmati file ran from application through an appellate direction in 2016 to a registration for the northern belt and a separate rejection of the Madhya Pradesh districts in 2018, with writ litigation continuing after that; the rasogolla file, by contrast, moved from application to registration for Odisha Rasagola between 2018 and July 2019. The register’s pace is therefore set by contest, not by the Registry alone: a name nobody disputes is registered quickly, and a name worth fighting over is fought over in the proceeding the Act designed for the purpose.

Two features of the dossier stage carry consequences beyond it. The first is that the specification filed at this stage hardens into the conditions of the right: the goods, the territory, the production discipline and the characteristics claimed become the register’s own text, against which infringement and rectification are later judged, so an applicant that claims too much invites rectification and an applicant that claims too little leaves part of the product’s identity undefended. The second is that the initial list of producers matters out of proportion to its size. The producers named for registration with the indication enter Part B at the grant; everyone else must find the Section 17 door afterwards, and the history of the register shows that most never do. A well built application therefore treats the initial authorised user list as a first enrolment drive rather than a schedule of the applicants’ own members, and the proprietors that have done so are, not coincidentally, the proprietors whose Part B entries give their registrations practical content.

The authorised user: the second entry that carries the right

The authorised user is defined by Section 2(1)(b) with deliberate circularity: an authorised user means the authorised user of a geographical indication registered under Section 17. Section 17 provides that any person claiming to be the producer of the goods in respect of which a geographical indication has been registered may apply in writing to the Registrar, in the prescribed manner and on payment of the prescribed fee, to be registered as an authorised user of the indication. The application must contain a statement of the particulars and documents of facts the Registrar requires, and the procedural machinery of the Act, examination, the power to refuse or accept subject to conditions, advertisement, opposition and registration, applies to authorised user applications as it applies to applications for the indication itself. Registration as an authorised user is therefore a real proceeding with a real possibility of refusal, not a rubber stamp on the proprietor’s say-so, although in practice the proprietor’s specification and the applicant’s place within the mapped territory and within the production discipline are what the proceeding tests.

The breadth of the gate turns on the word producer, and Section 2(1)(k) defines it generously, in three limbs matched to the three families of goods. In relation to goods of agricultural character, a producer means a person who produces the goods and includes a person who processes or packages them. In relation to natural goods, it means a person who exploits the goods. In relation to handicraft or industrial goods, it means a person who makes or manufactures the goods and includes any person who trades or deals in such production, exploitation, making or manufacture. The third limb is strikingly wide: for handicrafts and industrial goods, even a trader or dealer in the production can qualify as a producer for authorised user purposes. Parliament cast the net wide. The authorised user register remains thin, which tells the reader that the constraint on the register is not the statutory definition but the administrative step itself: producers must learn that the step exists, assemble the statement and the supporting records, much of the exchange with the Registry and the proprietor travelling in the form of office documents and spreadsheets that the association’s office can open and check in a browser-based office file viewer for the registry forms and evidence files, pay the fee and complete a proceeding whose benefit, the right to use a name they have used for generations without permission, is not obvious to them.

The position of the producer within the territory who never takes the step deserves precise statement, because it is the human content of the series claim that registration protects the name and not the producer. Such a producer holds no right under the Act. The exclusive right to use the indication belongs, by Section 21, to the registered authorised user; the right to obtain relief in respect of infringement belongs to the registered proprietor and the authorised users; the unregistered producer is named in neither Part B nor any rights provision, and cannot sue under the Act for misuse of the name, cannot claim the statutory exclusivity, and uses the name as a matter of geography and custom rather than of statutory entitlement. If the proprietor polices the indication through a certification or licensing system of its own, as the Tea Board does for Darjeeling, the unregistered producer may find market access itself conditioned on entering the proprietor’s system, a system whose legal foundation is the proprietor’s trade mark and administrative arrangements as much as the GI registration. General information of this kind explains the framework; it is not advice on any individual producer’s position, which depends on the specification and conditions recorded for the particular registration.

Why, then, do so few producers complete the step? The register study literature gives convergent answers, and none of them is a defect in Section 17’s drafting. The first is awareness: the GI tag is announced as a product’s honour, in ceremonies centred on the Part A registration, and the second proceeding that would give producers rights is rarely explained in the same breath. The second is documentation: producers in the informal economy, whose production is real but whose records are thin, must produce a statement and documents of fact about activity they have conducted all their lives without paperwork, and the transaction cost of assembling proof falls on the party least equipped to bear it. The third is benefit perception: a producer who has always sold under the regional name, and whose buyers have never asked for a registration number, rationally discounts a right whose value appears only when enforcement begins. The fourth is proprietor capacity: enrolment happens where the proprietor organises it, through camps, drives and the integration of authorised user registration into the certification the market already demands, and most proprietors are not resourced to run enrolment as a continuing programme. The 2025 study of the register recommended, among its reform measures, simplifying the authorised user registration process, running training and awareness programmes for stakeholders, and linking registered users to marketing and e-commerce channels so that the entry in Part B carries a visible commercial return. Those recommendations amount to a single insight: Part B fills when someone does the filling, and the Act assigns that labour, implicitly and without funding, to the proprietor.

Ten years at a time: duration, renewal and disappearance

Section 18 fixes the term. The registration of a geographical indication is for a period of ten years and may be renewed from time to time for further periods of ten years. The registration of an authorised user is for ten years or for the period until the registration of the indication itself expires, whichever is earlier, so an authorised user’s term can never outlive the registration it hangs from, and a renewal of the indication carries the framework within which authorised user registrations are renewed in step. There is no statutory ceiling on the number of renewals. A geographical indication is, in this respect, the opposite of a patent and unlike even a trade mark in one particular: it can in principle endure for as long as the link between product and place endures, and the ten-year cycle is an administrative checkpoint rather than a countdown to expiry of the right.

The renewal machinery has the usual safety valves and one distinctive consequence. The Registrar must send notice before expiry and may remove the indication from the register if the renewal fee is not paid; payment within six months after expiry, with the prescribed surcharge, still secures renewal; and a registration removed for non-payment can be restored on application made after six months and within one year from the expiration of the last registration, subject to conditions the Registrar imposes. The distinctive consequence is in Section 19: a geographical indication removed for non-payment of the renewal fee is still treated, for one year after removal, as though it were still on the register when a later application for registration of a geographical indication or a trade mark is considered, except where the tribunal is satisfied that there has been no bona fide trade use of the removed indication during the two years before removal, or that the later use or registration would cause no deception or confusion. A lapsed registration therefore casts a shadow over new applicants for a year, and proprietors who allow a registration to lapse expose the name twice over: the protection ends, and the Act’s memory of the registration, which obstructs imitators’ applications, fades with it.

The interlock between the two terms should be noted, since it follows from Section 18(2) and is often missed. Because an authorised user’s registration cannot outlive the registration of the indication, the fate of every Part B entry is hostage to the proprietor’s renewal discipline: a proprietor that sleeps through a renewal and fails to use the late payment and restoration windows does not merely lose its own Part A entry but collapses the frame within which hundreds of authorised user registrations subsist. The Act cushions the blow, through the surcharge window, the restoration window and the one year shadow of Section 19, but the structural dependency is real, and it is one more reason the proprietor’s institutional quality is the register’s central variable: continuity of the right is, in the end, an administrative habit of the custodian.

What the duration provisions do not contain is equally instructive. There is no provision cancelling a registration for non-use of the kind trade mark law applies to marks that sleep in the register: an indication whose trade has dwindled is corrected, if at all, through rectification on the application of a person aggrieved, not through a use-it-or-lose-it audit. The ten-year renewal is a fee event, not a re-examination of whether the link between product and place still holds. The register can therefore carry, and does carry, registrations whose production base has shrunk severely since grant, a feature the assessment of the Act’s record must reckon with: the register measures names protected, not trades sustained.

The rights registration actually confers

The effect of registration is stated in Section 21, and its allocation of rights tracks the two registers exactly. Subject to the Act, the registration of a geographical indication gives the registered proprietor and the authorised user or users the right to obtain relief in respect of infringement of the indication in the manner provided by the Act, and gives the authorised user the exclusive right to use the geographical indication in relation to the goods on which it is registered. Section 23 adds that registration is prima facie evidence of the validity of the registration and of the assignments and transmissions recorded under it, sparing the rights-holder the burden of proving validity from first principles in every suit. The proprietor’s right is thus principally a right to sue and to administer; the authorised user’s right is a right to sue and, distinctively, the exclusive right to use. Note the shape of that exclusivity: it is exclusive against the world outside the register, not against fellow authorised users, and it is held subject to any conditions and limitations to which the registration itself is subject under Section 21(2), the specification’s requirements being the standing example.

The conditions point in Section 21(2) is not boilerplate, and the register’s practice gives it content. Registrations are granted subject to the conditions and limitations recorded against them: the specification’s production discipline, the demarcated territory, the class and description of the goods, and any particular limitation the Registrar imposed at acceptance, such as a restriction on the form in which the indication may be used or on the channels of trade covered. Rights under the Act are exercised inside those recorded terms. The authorised user’s exclusive right, the proprietor’s right to relief and the infringement analysis all take the register entry as they find it, which is why the drafting of the specification and the negotiation of conditions at the dossier stage echo through every later dispute: a condition accepted in haste in the application year becomes the boundary of the right in the litigation year. The register, in short, does not merely record the right; in material part it writes it.

Can one authorised user stop another authorised user from using the indication?

No. Under Section 21(3), where two or more persons are registered as authorised users of identical or nearly resembling indications, the exclusive right to use is not acquired by any one of them as against any other, though each holds the full right against outsiders. Registration admits a producer to a shared right.

Set against what registration does not confer, the picture is complete. Registration does not create the reputation the name carries: the reputation must pre-exist, since it is an element of the definition. Registration does not certify quality in the Registrar’s own person: the Registrar registers the indication against the applicant’s specification and evidence, and the maintenance of standards in the market is the proprietor’s continuing system, not a state inspection. Registration does not give the proprietor a royalty stream, since Section 24 forbids licensing. And registration does not, by itself, put a rupee in any producer’s pocket: it fences the name. What the fence is worth depends on the authorised user register, on enforcement and on the market structure into which the goods are sold, which is the subject of the evidence examined near the end of this article.

The allocation has a practical corollary for litigation that first-time readers miss. The proprietor may sue an infringer although the proprietor sells nothing: its standing rests on the statutory right to obtain relief, and its interest is the integrity of the register and the name, which is why the proprietor is the system’s enforcer of first resort. An authorised user may equally sue in the user’s own name, and an authorised user need not wait for a passive or impecunious proprietor to move: the right to relief is conferred on both, and the user’s suit protects the user’s own exclusive right to use. The defendant cannot answer either plaintiff by pointing to the other register entry: against the proprietor, the answer must be that the use is not within Section 22 or that the registration should not stand; against the authorised user, the same. Where several authorised users trade in the same market, each holds the right against the infringing outsider, and none holds it against the others, so the register’s plaintiffs are the proprietor and the admitted users acting in parallel, which is the litigation shape the two part register was always going to produce.

Infringement: three ways to cross the line

Section 22 defines infringement, and its opening words carry the register’s logic into the courtroom: a registered geographical indication is infringed by a person who, not being an authorised user, uses the indication in a prohibited way. Three limbs follow. Under the first limb, infringement occurs where such a person uses the indication, by any means, in the designations or presentations of goods, in a manner that indicates or suggests that the goods originate in a geographical area other than their true place of origin, in a way that misleads persons as to the geographical origin of the goods. The paradigm is the outside trader selling tea, rice or craft goods under the registered regional name: the wrong is not copying a label but falsifying origin. Under the second limb, infringement occurs where the use constitutes an act of unfair competition including passing off: the Explanation to the section spells unfair competition out as acts contrary to honest trade practices, including acts that create confusion with another’s enterprise or goods, allegations that discredit another’s goods, and indications whose use misleads the public as to the nature, manufacturing process, characteristics, suitability or quantity of the goods. Under the third limb, infringement occurs where a person uses another geographical indication on goods, in a manner that, although literally true as to the territory where those goods originate, falsely represents to the public that the goods originate in the territory of the registered indication: the true-in-terms but falsely presenting case that Section 9 refuses at the door and Section 22 punishes after it.

Two boundaries of the infringement right are as important as its content. The first is exhaustion in a modest form: Section 22(4) provides that where goods bearing a registered indication have been lawfully acquired by a person, a later sale or other dealing in those goods is not infringement, except where the condition of the goods has been changed or impaired after they were put on the market, which keeps parallel trade in genuine goods lawful and confines the right to the point of authentic origin. The second boundary is the one Section 20 draws around the whole scheme: no person is entitled to institute any proceeding to prevent, or to recover damages for, the infringement of an unregistered geographical indication. The common law, however, is expressly saved: nothing in the Act affects rights of action against any person for passing off goods as the goods of another, or the remedies available in such an action. The statute thus runs two tracks in parallel: the registered track, with its defined infringement limbs and prima facie validity, open only to those on the registers; and the passing off track, available without registration but demanding proof of reputation, misrepresentation and damage in every case.

The limbs repay a worked illustration. Suppose a trader in another State blends tea grown entirely outside the Darjeeling district, packs it in the district’s style of chest and label, and sells it as Darjeeling tea with a line of small print naming the true State of manufacture. The first limb of Section 22(1) is engaged: the designation suggests origin in Darjeeling and misleads as to geographical origin, and the small print is unlikely to rescue a presentation whose dominant message is false. The second limb is engaged as well, since the use is an act of unfair competition against the registered users and against honest traders. Suppose instead that the trader sells the rival tea under a label stating plainly that it is a Darjeeling style tea grown elsewhere. For ordinary registered goods the analysis turns on whether the presentation misleads; for goods notified under Section 22(2), Section 22(3) answers without more: style labels, translations and true origin statements are no defence, because the higher tier forbids the use itself. The distance between the two tiers is the distance between those two labels, and it is measured entirely by the notification.

The words of the first limb, use by any means in the designations or presentations of goods, are deliberately wider than a labels provision. A designation is the name under which goods are presented for sale, and a presentation extends to the get up, the catalogue entry and the listing by which the goods are offered, so a seller who keeps the registered indication off the packet but builds it into the product’s title in a trade catalogue or an online marketplace listing is, on the face of the section, using the indication in the presentation of the goods. The breadth matters to enforcement strategy: the proprietor need not wait for physical packaging to move, and the infringer cannot defeat the section by retreating from the label to the advertisement. It also explains why the Tea Board’s foreign enforcement has so often been directed at trade mark applications and trade presentations rather than at seizures of goods: the name is taken in presentations long before it is printed on chests.

A boundary question of the same section is the position of the authorised user who steps outside the register’s conditions. The exclusive right conferred by Section 21 is expressly subject to the conditions and limitations entered on the register, and the specification is the principal condition: an authorised user who applies the indication to goods that fall outside the specification, goods from outside the territory, goods failing the stated characteristics, is not exercising the statutory right at all, and the proprietor’s remedies include the register’s own corrective machinery as well as the law of infringement and passing off that governs strangers. Registration as an authorised user is thus a bounded licence from the statute itself, bounded by the territory, the goods and the specification, and the boundary is what keeps the collective right honest: admission to Part B is not ownership of the name but a conditional share in its use.

Higher protection: the notified goods tier

TRIPS drew a line through the middle of geographical indication law, and the 1999 Act reproduces it. Article 22 of TRIPS sets the general standard, protection against misleading use and unfair competition, which the limbs of Section 22(1) implement. Article 23 sets a higher standard for wines and spirits alone: for those products, use of the indication on goods not originating in the place is prohibited even where the true origin is stated, even where the indication is translated, and even where it is accompanied by expressions such as kind, type, style or imitation. A label that honestly says it is an imitation of the famous original infringes the higher tier anyway, because experience with wines and spirits showed that qualifiers did not cure the taking of the name.

Section 22(2) and (3) import that architecture into Indian law as a power rather than a completed list. The Central Government may, by notification in the Official Gazette, specify the goods or classes of goods in respect of which additional protection applies, and where goods stand so notified, Section 22(3) provides that any person who, not being an authorised user, uses a geographical indication in relation to those goods infringes it, notwithstanding that the true place of origin is indicated, or that the indication is used in translation, or accompanied by expressions like kind, style or imitation. The drafting follows the TRIPS higher tier almost word for word, and the provision was designed with wines and spirits, the TRIPS beneficiaries, as its model case. The structural point for the reader is the asymmetry the provision creates within the Indian register: ordinary registrations are protected against misleading use, while notified goods are protected against use itself, and the value of a registration can therefore depend on an executive notification as well as on the registration. India’s long-standing demand in international negotiations, that the Article 23 tier be extended to other products, is the diplomatic shadow of this section: the domestic provision already contains the machinery that an extension of the higher tier would switch on for rice, tea and textiles.

The diplomatic context of the tier deserves a paragraph, because it explains why the Indian provision is written as a power awaiting notification rather than as a closed list. TRIPS itself left the higher tier unfinished business: Article 23.4 set in train negotiations for a multilateral system of notification and registration of geographical indications for wines, later extended in mandate discussions to spirits, and Article 24.1 committed members to negotiations aimed at increasing the protection of individual indications under Article 23. At the Doha Ministerial Conference in 2001 the extension question, whether the Article 23 tier should reach products beyond wines and spirits, was placed on the negotiating agenda over the opposition of members that preferred the Article 22 standard. India, with the European Union and a group of other demandeurs, argued extension on precisely the ground Section 22(2) presupposes: that the distinction between wine names and names such as Basmati or Darjeeling is a distinction of negotiating history rather than of principle, since the harm Article 23 answers, the taking of a famous origin name with honest qualifiers, is identical in both cases. The negotiations never produced the extension, and the domestic provision therefore stands as a loaded mechanism: the Act can deliver Article 23 level protection to any goods the Central Government notifies, and the set of goods so protected is a matter of executive choice informed by the same arguments India presses abroad.

The right that cannot be sold

Section 24 is one sentence long and it reverses the default assumption of property law. Notwithstanding anything contained in any other law, no right to a registered geographical indication may be the subject matter of assignment, transmission, licensing, pledge, mortgage or any such other agreement. The proviso admits a single exception: where an authorised user dies, the right devolves on the successor in title under the law in force. Every other route by which an intellectual property right ordinarily changes hands, sale, licence, security interest, settlement, is closed.

The reasons are structural, and they follow from the definition. The right is essentially attributable to a place. If the indication for a region’s tea could be assigned to a company outside the region, the assignee would hold a right whose statutory foundation, the link between the goods and the territory, it could not itself satisfy; the name would have been severed from the only thing that justifies its protection. Assignment would also convert a collective entitlement into a private asset by a single transaction, expropriating in law the producers whose collective reputation the registration records and who never consented to the sale. Licensing is barred for a cognate reason: a licence is a permission to use the name in return for payment, and a licensing market in the name would let the proprietor monetise the reputation of producers while the producers, the reputation’s authors, stood outside the transaction. Parliament’s answer is that the name is held in a custodial register, administered for the producing community, and is not in commerce at all.

The trade-off is real, and the Darjeeling system shows the workaround it forces. A proprietor that cannot license the GI cannot fund enforcement from GI royalties, and cannot franchise production standards through a GI licence with quality clauses and termination rights. Proprietors therefore reach for the instrument that can be licensed: the certification trade mark, which the Tea Board holds over the Darjeeling word and logo alongside the GI registration, and through which the practical conditions of use, inspection, chain of custody certification and permission to apply the logo, are administered. The GI registration supplies the statutory perimeter and the register; the certification mark supplies the operational machinery the GI withholds. Understanding the Darjeeling arrangement requires holding both instruments in view at once, and the comparison article to which this series assigns the three-way contrast of the rights takes up the structured comparison of patent, copyright and trade mark protection that the geographical indication joins as a fourth model, one in which the right is deliberately made untradeable.

The foreign dimension: convention claims and reciprocity

The Act’s international provisions are brief but they do real work, and a pillar account should state them. India is a party to the Paris Convention and to TRIPS, and the Act extends its registration system to indications from convention countries: an applicant from such a country may claim the benefit of the filing date of an earlier application at home, in the manner the Act prescribes for convention applications, so that the Indian proceeding is anchored to the foreign filing rather than to the date the papers reached Chennai. The substantive examination is unchanged: a foreign indication must still satisfy Section 2(1)(e), must still clear the Section 9 bars, and must still be applied for by a body representing the producers of the territory concerned, which in the European cases means the consortium or council that administers the name at home. The foreign entries on the Indian register, wines, spirits and cheeses prominent among them, are therefore not courtesies; they are registrations won through the same dossier and the same opposition exposure as an Indian craft.

Reciprocity is the provision with teeth. Where a country does not permit Indians to register geographical indications there, or does not accord the protection the Act contemplates, the Central Government may notify that country, and nationals and bodies of that country may then be denied registration in India. The provision converts the register into a bargaining instrument of the same kind as the extension demand in the TRIPS Council: protection abroad for Indian names is the price of protection in India for foreign ones. The existence of the sanction matters more than its use, since its function is to be pointed to in negotiations. For the Indian reader the practical consequence runs in the other direction: the fame of names such as Darjeeling and Basmati is realised in export markets, and the Indian register is only the home anchor of a defence that must be replicated, register by register, wherever the goods are sold and wherever the name is coveted.

India stands outside the Lisbon system and its Geneva Act extension, the treaty route by which a single international registration carries an appellation or indication across the member registers, so the replication cannot be done by one filing. Each significant market requires its own proceeding: a GI application in the European Union’s register, certification or collective marks in the United States, where the trade mark system is the available vehicle, register entries and oppositions in the jurisdictions between. The cost of that replication falls, again, on the proprietor, and it is the deepest structural reason why the protection of Indian names abroad tracks the wealth and organisation of their proprietors rather than the fame of the names. Darjeeling’s perimeter exists because the Tea Board could fund four decades of filings. A craft name of equal antiquity and a proprietor without an export budget has, abroad, roughly the protection that passing off in a foreign court would give a plaintiff who cannot afford to appear: a right in theory, respected mainly where someone is watching.

The layered defence: why proprietors also hold marks

The mature Indian practice for a valuable origin name is a layering of instruments, and the layering is best understood as a rational response to the GI Act’s deliberate gaps. The first layer is the GI registration itself: the statutory perimeter, the specification, the Part A and Part B entries, and the infringement and offence provisions that attend them. The second layer is the certification trade mark, held under the Trade Marks Act 1999 by the same proprietor over the same word or logo. A certification mark certifies that goods bearing it possess the origin, material, mode of manufacture or quality the mark’s regulations state, and unlike a geographical indication it operates through the proprietor’s own regulations for the use of the mark: producers and traders are authorised under those regulations, conditions are enforced contractually through the certification system, and the logo that consumers actually recognise can be administered mark by mark and market by market. The Tea Board’s Darjeeling system is the type specimen: the word and the logo have been protected as certification marks in India and abroad since the 1980s, the logo is also protected as a copyright work, and the GI registration of 2004 was laid over an operating certification practice rather than substituted for it. The third layer is the preserved common law: passing off, saved by Section 20(2), which reaches conduct the registration’s wording may not, at the price of proving reputation and deception afresh.

The layering has an institutional moral that the assessment of the Act must carry. Each layer answers a disability of the layer beneath it. The GI cannot be licensed, so the certification mark supplies the licensing machinery. The GI reaches only goods, so the trade mark registers are used to contest service uses and defensive filings that the GI register cannot touch. The GI speaks in the register’s language of territories and specifications, so the logo and the certification system speak in the market’s language of labels and audits. A proprietor with the resources and sophistication to maintain all three layers, a statutory board for an export product, extracts from the 1999 Act nearly everything its framers hoped registration would give. A proprietor with only the first layer extracts the title deed and little of the machinery. The statute is uniform; the protection it produces is not, and the variable is the proprietor.

The trade mark boundary

The two registers were designed in awareness of each other, and Chapter V of the Act, the special provisions relating to trade marks and prior users, polices the frontier. Section 25 directs that, notwithstanding anything in the Trade Marks Act 1999, the Registrar of Trade Marks must, of the Registrar’s own motion or at the request of an interested person, refuse or invalidate the registration of a trade mark which contains or consists of a geographical indication in respect of goods not originating in the territory indicated, if the use of that indication in the trade mark would cause confusion or mislead persons as to the true place of origin of the goods; and must likewise refuse or invalidate a trade mark containing or consisting of a geographical indication identifying goods that the Central Government has notified for additional protection. The bar matters because the trade mark register is where an exclusive private right in a regional name would otherwise be built: the pillar article on the Trade Marks Act 1999 covers the registration system into which this prohibition cuts. A trader who cannot own the GI, because only a producer body may hold it, cannot circumvent the design by trade-marking the name for the same goods from outside the region: Section 25 closes the side door.

Section 26 then protects the past. A trade mark applied for or registered in good faith, or rights in a trade mark acquired through use in good faith, before the commencement of the Act or before the date of the GI application, whichever is earlier in the statutory scheme, are not prejudiced by the Act, and the Registrar of Geographical Indications may not refuse the GI by reason of such a mark. The Act likewise does not apply in relation to a geographical indication identical with a term customary in common language as the common name of the goods in any part of India on or before the first day of January 1995, protecting names that had already become the ordinary words for the goods before the registration era by legislative choice of date. A person’s bona fide use of that person’s own name, or the name of a place of business or of predecessors in business, is preserved subject to the Act’s other provisions, and a five-year limit bars actions concerning the use or registration of a trade mark in the circumstances the section specifies. The coexistence settlement is therefore deliberate in both directions: the GI register cannot be ambushed by a fresh trade mark in the name, and the GI statute cannot be used to extinguish honest trade mark positions that predate it.

Can a geographical indication be enforced against a business that uses the name for services?

The Darjeeling litigation answers this: not on the strength of the registration. The Tea Board sued ITC over the Darjeeling Lounge in Kolkata, and the Calcutta High Court refused to restrain it: the registration covers goods, tea, while the lounge was a refreshment service. Infringement under the Act operates in relation to goods, and the services use stood outside it.

The case, Tea Board, India v. I.T.C. Limited, was the first Indian court decision on a registered geographical indication, and its limits are as instructive as its result. The single judge refused the interlocutory injunction and a division bench of the Calcutta High Court declined to disturb that refusal in 2011. The reasoning ranged over the goods and services divide in both the GI Act and the certification marks, the fact that the lounge business had been established on 1 January 2003, before the Act commenced on 15 September 2003, and the good faith protections of Section 26. The proposition the case settles durably is narrow and important: registration under the Act is a right in relation to the goods and territory in Part A, and a service business’s use of the geographical name stands outside it. Proprietors who want the name policed beyond goods must assemble that protection from trade mark and passing off law, which is precisely what the Tea Board had done in parallel for decades.

What the case did not decide is worth equal care, since it is frequently cited for more than it holds. The court did not hold that a geographical name is free for any services use whatever: the claim failed on the reach of the particular registrations and instruments pleaded, for goods, against a service business that had commenced before the Act, and a differently framed claim, on different instruments against a later and more imitative services use, would present different questions under trade mark and passing off law. Nor did the case dilute the GI registration for its proper subject: for tea, the perimeter stood untouched. The durable lesson is about the architecture of protection rather than about Darjeeling’s weakness. A registration statute built on goods and territory answers goods questions completely and services questions not at all, and the proprietor of a name whose value spills across that line, into hospitality, retail experience and brand extension, must hold the spill with other law. The 1999 Act’s silence on services is a boundary of the legislative design, and the first court asked to test the boundary reported it faithfully.

Enforcement on paper: the civil, criminal and corrective tracks

A rights-holder under the Act has three tracks, and the assessment of the statute has to distinguish what the tracks promise from what they cost. The first track is the civil suit for infringement or passing off, in which the court may grant the standard relief of the intellectual property plaintiff: an injunction, and at the plaintiff’s election damages or an account of profits, together with orders for the delivery up of infringing labels and materials. Since the abolition of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board by the Tribunals Reforms Act 2021, with effect from 4 April 2021, the appellate and rectification work that the Board performed under this Act lies with the High Courts: appeals from the Registrar lie to the High Court within three months under Section 31, and the Board’s former docket, the Basmati appeals among the prominent files, passed to the High Courts with it.

The second track is corrective. Under Section 27, a person aggrieved may apply to the Registrar or to the High Court for rectification of the register: the tribunal may order the cancellation or variation of a registration on the ground of contravention of, or failure to observe, a condition entered on the register in relation to it, and may make orders for correcting entries wrongly made or wrongly remaining, and for expunging or varying entries. Rectification is the standing answer to the register’s lack of a non-use audit: a registration that has ceased to correspond to any real production, or an entry that was wrong from the start, can be attacked by a person aggrieved, although the initiative, the evidence and the cost all lie on the challenger.

The rectification jurisdiction deserves its own emphasis, because it is the register’s only standing mechanism for correcting a registration that should not have been made or should not survive. An application may be made by any person aggrieved, a category the case law of the cognate trade mark jurisdiction reads to include traders and producers whose legitimate interests the entry affects, and the grounds reach both the registration of the indication and the registration of authorised users: contravention of a condition on the register, an entry made without sufficient cause, an entry wrongly remaining, and errors or defects in an entry are all within the tribunal’s corrective reach, and the tribunal may cancel, vary or correct accordingly, after giving the registered proprietor and any affected authorised user the opportunity to be heard. The Darjeeling and Basmati files show both faces of the jurisdiction: it is the forum in which a boundary wrongly drawn can be redrawn, and it is also the standing threat that disciplines proprietors into keeping their specifications honest, since every condition they write into the register is a condition whose breach an aggrieved person can plead.

The third track is criminal, and its design borrows the trade mark offences code. Section 38 defines falsifying a geographical indication, applying a false indication to goods, and the making or possession of instruments for falsification, and places the burden of proving the proprietor’s assent, where assent is the defence, on the accused. Section 39 punishes falsifying or falsely applying an indication, and the connected offences of applying a false indication of origin and tampering with an origin indication, with imprisonment for a term of not less than six months and up to three years, and a fine of not less than fifty thousand rupees and up to two lakh rupees, with a judicial power to go below the minimum for adequate and special reasons recorded in the judgment. Section 40 applies the same scale to selling, exposing for sale, or possessing for sale or manufacture goods bearing a false indication, with defences for the trader who took reasonable precautions, had no reason to suspect the indication, and gives the prosecution the information identifying the supplier. Section 41 raises the scale on a second or subsequent conviction to imprisonment of one to three years and a fine of one to two lakh rupees. Section 46 empowers the court to order forfeiture of the offending goods to the Government, and Section 47 protects persons employed in the ordinary course of business who innocently printed or applied labels.

The offences code connects to the customs border at one point that completes the enforcement picture. Section 71 of the Act imposes a requirement as to the indication of origin on imported goods, and the tampering offence in Section 39 reaches a person who tampers with an indication of origin applied to goods in pursuance of that requirement. The design is the Paris Convention’s importation logic carried into the statute: false origin is policed not only in the domestic market but at the point of entry, where the imported consignment’s own origin marking is a legal representation that the Act protects against alteration. For a register whose famous names face their hardest misuse abroad and in import channels, the border provision is a small but telling part of the kit, and its presence shows the framers thinking of the indication as a representation made to the market at every point where goods change hands, rather than as a label rule for domestic packs alone.

One corner of the offences code has been rebuilt since. Section 42, which punished falsely representing a geographical indication as registered, was converted by the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act 2023, with effect from 1 August 2024, from an imprisonment offence into a monetary penalty, of half per cent of total sales or turnover or five lakh rupees, whichever is less, administered through the adjudicating officer machinery that the same amendment inserted into the Act, The same amendment inserted Sections 37A and 37B into the Act, providing for the appointment of an adjudicating officer to hold the inquiry and determine the penalty, and for appeals from that determination, so that the converted offence is processed administratively end to end rather than through a criminal court. Two connected sections were omitted by the same amendment. The change is a deliberate decriminalisation of a labelling offence, and it belongs to the same deregulatory arc that the Jan Vishwas Act applied across the statute book: the grave offences of falsification keep their prison terms, while the offence of claiming a registration that does not exist is treated as a regulatory default to be priced rather than prosecuted.

Two procedural features of the tracks deserve note before the assessment. The civil track’s prima facie rule matters more in practice than its brevity suggests: because Section 23 makes the registration prima facie evidence of validity, the defendant who wishes to contest the right must attack the register entry itself, ordinarily by a rectification application under Section 27, and the Act’s scheme, following trade mark practice, channels the validity contest into the rectification proceeding, a choreography that rewards the proprietor whose specification was drafted defensively at the dossier stage. The criminal track has a reciprocal feature: the procedure provisions require a court, where the accused pleads that the registration is invalid, to adjourn the prosecution for a period to allow a rectification application to be made and determined, so that a criminal conviction cannot rest on a registration that a competent tribunal would have cancelled. The design is careful in both directions: registration is strong evidence but never irrebuttable, and the corrective jurisdiction stands behind both tracks as the register’s court of error.

The distance between the tracks on paper and enforcement in fact is the recurring theme of the register’s critics, and it is a distance measured in money and organisation rather than in rights. A civil suit or a prosecution is brought by the proprietor or by authorised users, in practice by the proprietor institution on the community’s behalf, and the proprietor institutions of most registrations are State bodies, societies and boards with many mandates and thin litigation budgets. Oppositions and cancellations abroad, where much of the misuse of famous Indian names occurs, cost more than domestic proceedings. The Act gives a complete kit of remedies; whether any particular name is defended depends on the proprietor’s capacity, which is a finding about institutions, not about drafting.

Darjeeling: the first registration and the hardest case

The Darjeeling registration is the worked example the statute keeps returning to, because every feature of the design appears in it in extreme form. The applications for the Darjeeling word and for the Darjeeling logo, the device of a woman holding tea leaves, were applications numbered 1 and 2 in the new Registry and became the first geographical indications registered in India, in 2004. The registered proprietor is the Tea Board of India, the statutory authority for the tea industry constituted under the Tea Act 1953. The registration covers tea originating in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, and its specification is built on the gardens of the district, eighty seven gardens whose production the system covers. The application assembled the standard elements of the link in their most persuasive form: a defined high altitude territory, a distinctive agro-climatic regime of altitude, rainfall, temperature and soil, two leaves and a bud plucked from bushes at elevation, and a century and a half of accumulated planting and processing practice in the gardens. If the definition in Section 2(1)(e) fits any product without argument, it fits this one.

The specification’s quality account also rests on the structure of the Darjeeling season, which the certification system polices as strictly as the boundary. The gardens harvest in distinct flushes across the year, the spring first flush, the summer second flush, the monsoon flush and the autumn flush, and the flushes yield teas differing in character and price, the early flushes commanding the premium that the name’s export reputation is built on. A registration whose characteristics claim is stated at the level of the product in general must still be administered at the level of the season and the garden, since admixture across flushes and across gardens is the ordinary commercial temptation the chain of custody exists to defeat. The Darjeeling file thus shows the specification doing double work: in the register it is the statement of the Section 2(1)(e) link, and in the market it is the audit standard against which every consignment claiming the name is checked. Proprietors whose specifications are written only for the register discover, at the first serious misuse, that the document was supposed to be an operating manual as well.

The proprietor produces nothing. The Tea Board grows no tea, operates no factory and sells no chests; the gardens are owned and run by companies and proprietors distinct from the Board. What the Board does is administer the name: it holds the registration, maintains the certification system through which gardens, producers, buyers and exporters are brought within a chain of custody for tea sold under the name, polices misuse in India and abroad, and defends the word and the logo in foreign registries and courts. The Board had been doing much of that work under trade mark law long before the GI Act commenced, protecting Darjeeling as a certification mark in India and in markets abroad since the 1980s; the GI registration of 2004 added the statutory register and the Section 21 rights to an operating system rather than creating the system. The subsequent European registration of Darjeeling as a protected geographical indication in the European Union extended the perimeter to the export market where the name’s premium is largest.

The machinery the Board runs under and around the registration is worth describing, because it is the part of the system no other provision of Indian law supplies. Tea may be sold under the Darjeeling name only through the Board’s certification arrangements: gardens within the registered area produce the leaf, the production is documented, buyers and exporters who wish to trade in the tea under the name are brought within the system, and the chain of custody is certified so that a consignment presented in a foreign market as Darjeeling can be traced to the gardens of the district. The point of the chain is the blending problem. Tea is a bulk commodity that invites admixture, and a certification that attached only to the garden gate would dissolve in the first warehouse; the Board’s system therefore follows the tea through sale and export. The GI registration underwrites the whole structure by fixing the name, the territory and the specification in a public register against which the certification documents can be checked, and by giving the Board the Section 21 right to proceed against users outside the system. Registration and certification are, in this arrangement, two halves of one design, and it is the second half, the expensive and unglamorous half, that most registrations in India lack.

The enforcement premise of the whole arrangement is the volume gap: far more tea is sold in the world under the Darjeeling name than the eighty seven gardens produce, a disparity the Tea Board has made the centre of its case in opposition after opposition and action after action abroad, where it has resisted applications and uses of the name for teas and for unrelated goods and services across many jurisdictions. The Darjeeling record therefore supports two readings, and the assessment section of this article will have to choose between them. The favourable reading is that the GI framework, layered over certification marks and foreign registrations, gave a dispersed, high value origin product a durable legal perimeter that a passing off regime alone had failed to supply, administered by a statutory body with the continuity to defend it. The critical reading is that Darjeeling is the exception that tests the rule: it has an unusually strong, well funded statutory proprietor, an organised garden sector of companies rather than a sea of smallholders, and an export premium worth litigating for, and even Darjeeling’s GI could not reach a hotel lounge using the name for services. Whether the framework generalises beyond its strongest case is the question the rest of the register answers.

The timeline of the Darjeeling defence shows the layering being built over four decades. The Tea Board created the Darjeeling logo in 1983 and protected the word and logo as certification marks in India and in overseas markets in the years that followed, litigating misuse under trade mark and unfair competition law in the markets where the premium was earned. The GI Act added the home register in 2004, with the two pioneer registrations. The European registration of Darjeeling as a protected geographical indication in 2011, the first Indian name on that register, converted the defence in the largest export market from a patchwork of national marks into a register right of the European system itself. Each instrument was added when the previous one’s limits were reached, and the order is instructive: the market facing instruments came first, because the misuse was in the market; the GI registration came when India built the institution; and the foreign GI registration came last, because it required the home registration and the foreign system’s own procedure. Proprietors of younger Indian registrations are retracing the same sequence with fewer resources, which is the practical content of the claim that Darjeeling is both the model and the exception.

Drawing the map: Basmati and the sweets war

The Basmati registration shows the Act’s machinery turned inward, on the question of where the territory ends. Basmati rice is grown across the Indo-Gangetic plain, and the controversy that attended the registration by the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, the proprietor, was never about whether Basmati is a geographical indication: it was about which States’ rice is inside the name. The application confined the territory to the traditional belt, and Madhya Pradesh claimed that thirteen of its districts, with a long record of basmati cultivation and seed history, belonged inside the map. The claim travelled through the Registry, the Assistant Registrar and the Intellectual Property Appellate Board, whose order of 5 February 2016 directed the grant of the registration for Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Uttarakhand, western Uttar Pradesh and two districts of Jammu and Kashmir, and required the claim of Madhya Pradesh to be considered on its evidence. On 15 March 2018 the Assistant Registrar rejected the Madhya Pradesh claim, holding that the State had not established that its rice possessed the same qualities as traditional Basmati or enjoyed the same popular public perception of it, the distinctive aroma being tied to the climatic conditions of the Indo-Gangetic plains.

The litigation did not end there: writ proceedings reached the Madras High Court, and the Supreme Court remitted the matter for fresh consideration without deciding the substance, so the boundary question has been argued for years while the registration itself stands for the northern belt. The legal significance of the episode is that the map filed under Section 11 is not a formality but the operative act of distribution: to draw the boundary is to decide which producers may aspire to authorised user status and which are outside the name altogether, and the evidence on which it is drawn, agro-climatic studies, cultivation history, seed provenance and public perception, is exactly the evidence of the Section 2(1)(e) link fought at the scale of districts. A registration system for origin products will produce boundary wars wherever a celebrated product’s growing area crosses administrative lines, and the Indian system’s honest answer is that the wars are decided, slowly and by evidence, inside the registration framework rather than by marketing power outside it. Basmati’s boundary has since been argued on a second front: India sought protected status for Basmati in the European Union’s register, and Pakistan, whose own Punjab grows basmati rice and whose exporters share the name’s markets, opposed the application, so that the question the Indian Registry answered for the northern belt is being examined again, with an additional claimant, in the European proceeding. A name’s territory, the episode confirms, is not a fact the world simply finds; it is a determination each register makes on the evidence before it, and determinations can differ.

The sweets war between Bengal and Odisha shows the alternative settlement. Rosogolla, the syrupy cheese sweet, is claimed by both States as their creation. West Bengal obtained registration of Banglar Rasogolla on 14 November 2017, and the grant provoked an immediate public controversy; the Registry clarified that what had been registered was the Bengali variant under its specification and that the registration was not a judgment that the sweet originated in Bengal. Odisha then prosecuted its own application, and Odisha Rasagola was registered on 29 July 2019, in the name of the Odisha Small Industries Corporation Limited and the Utkala Mistanna Byabasayee Samiti, with a specification tied to the Odisha variant and its own production tradition. The two registrations coexist, with different names, different specifications and different territories. Read against Section 10’s philosophy of homonymous indications, coexistence under differentiated specifications is the statute’s characteristic resolution of a shared heritage claim: neither State’s account of a centuries old sweet could be extinguished by the other’s registration, so the register recorded both, narrowed to what each could prove. The episode also taught the register a public communication lesson: a GI registration decides the legal perimeter of a name, not the historical question of who invented a dish, and the Registry’s clarification in 2017 deserves to be remembered whenever a grant is announced as a verdict on origin.

The specification as a standard: inclusion, exclusion and quiet power

One aspect of the design receives less attention than the registers themselves, and it conditions everything the benefit evidence shows: the specification is a standard, and somebody writes it. The registered specification states the characteristics the goods must have, the methods by which they are produced, and the conditions the register records, and those statements decide, in advance, which producers inside the territory can comply and which cannot. A specification written around the methods of the larger and better documented producers may describe the product accurately and still exclude the smallest producers, whose methods vary at the margin, whose records cannot demonstrate compliance, and whose output is absorbed, if at all, through intermediaries. A specification written loosely admits everyone and protects little, because the name then certifies a geography and nothing else. The Act does not resolve this tension; it locates it, in the applicant body’s drafting, subject to the Registrar’s examination and to opposition by any person who can show the specification misdescribes the product or the territory. Opposition is therefore not merely a rival’s weapon: it is the one procedural moment at which the excluded, or those speaking for them, can contest the standard before it hardens into the conditions of the right.

Critics of the framework add a connected observation about the direction of standard setting. Where the proprietor is a State body or a board, the specification tends to be written for the market the State wishes to reach, export grading, packaging and certification disciplines, rather than for the market the producers actually serve, and the authorised user register then fills with the producers already closest to the formal economy. The observation is consistent with the register arithmetic: enrolment is thinnest precisely where production is most dispersed and least documented. The answer the Act’s defenders give is equally structural: a name cannot be defended in a foreign registry or a foreign court without a specification that foreign tribunals can apply, and the premium that justifies the whole exercise is earned in the markets that demand documentation. Both points are true, and their conjunction is the honest summary of the design: the statute protects names in the form that distant markets can verify, and producers benefit to the extent that they can present themselves in that form, which is a capability the registration itself does not supply.

Has registration delivered? The two assessments

The favourable assessment begins with the perimeter. Before 2003, an Indian origin name misused abroad could be defended only by passing off actions in foreign courts or by certification marks the proprietor happened to have filed; the register created a public, dated, specification-bearing record that foreign registries and courts can be pointed to, and gave proprietors standing to oppose applications for the name across jurisdictions. The count of registrations is not trivial: a 2025 study of the Intellectual Property India record for the years 2004 to 2024, published in the Archives of Current Research International, counted 643 registered geographical indications by 2024, of which 605 were of Indian origin, and the register has steadily added State after State’s emblematic products, handicrafts first in volume, agriculture close behind. Product-level accounts credit registration, in combination with certification and promotion, with defending export premiums for Darjeeling tea and with opening shelf space and recognition for craft products that previously sold anonymously into supply chains. On this assessment the Act did the job a registration statute can do: it created the right, the register and the standing, and the growth of the register is the growth of the country’s recorded origin capital.

The favourable assessment also draws on the promotional superstructure the State has built around the register. Registered products are showcased in trade promotion, carried into government supported exhibitions and buyer programmes, and onboarded onto public digital marketplaces as a distinct category of Indian goods, so that the registration functions as a credential in the State’s own marketing machinery as well as in private trade. Facilitation efforts by the Union government and by States, supporting applicants through the dossier stage and producers through authorised user enrolment, belong to the same superstructure. On the strongest version of the favourable case, the GI tag is best understood as a platform: the statute supplies the verified claim, and the promotion, certification and enrolment systems built on it determine how much of the claim’s value reaches the territory. The critics answer, in substance, that a platform metaphor concedes their point, since the platform’s benefits flow to those positioned to use it, and the register’s own Part B arithmetic shows how few producers stand on it.

The critical assessment begins exactly where the favourable one ends, with Part B. The same 2025 study found that of the 643 registered indications, only 275 had any registered authorised users at all, and that those registrations carried approximately 29,624 authorised users in total; among agricultural goods, only 95 of 197 registrations had authorised users. Growth on the user side is real: figures of the Press Information Bureau, drawn from the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, record authorised users rising from 365 in 2015 to approximately 29,000 by January 2025, but set against the producing populations of the registered products, hundreds of thousands of weavers, growers and artisans across the register, roughly thirty thousand authorised users is a small enclosure. The study’s estimate that only about fifteen to twenty per cent of potential producers complete authorised user registration is consistent with the register arithmetic. Registration therefore protects names on behalf of communities most of whose members hold no registered right, cannot themselves sue under the Act, and depend on the proprietor’s capacity and willingness to act.

The flow of applications tells the same two sided story in administrative form. A review of the Geographical Indications Journal’s record, published in the Journal of Intellectual Property Rights, counted 1,167 applications received by the Registry and 547 indications registered by December 2023, with the 2025 register study’s figure of 643 registrations by 2024 showing the register’s growth continuing at pace. Applications are not the constraint: States, boards and societies have learned to file them, and the register’s composition, spread across handicrafts, agricultural goods, foodstuffs, manufactured goods and natural goods, shows the filing culture reaching every category the definition admits. The attrition sits downstream of the filing, in the conversion of a Part A entry into a working system of authorised users, inspection and enforcement, and the ratio of the two registers is the cleanest single statistic of that attrition.

The critics’ second point concerns the value chain. A fence around a name determines who may use the name; it does not determine what the producer is paid. Origin goods leave the village through traders, aggregators and mandis, and the price a grower receives is set by that marketing system, in agriculture by the regulated market framework examined in the article on the APMC Act and agricultural marketing, long before any GI premium negotiated at the export or retail end can filter back. Where premiums exist at the consumer end, the actors positioned to capture them are the ones who control grading, certification, packing and sale, which is why the Darjeeling arrangement, in which the statutory proprietor also runs the certification chain, is structurally stronger than a registration whose proprietor is a distant State corporation with no presence in the market. Evaluations of individual products repeatedly find the same distribution pattern: the name’s rent is real, its incidence on the actual producer is uneven, and registration alone does not move it.

A third strand of the favourable case is diplomatic rather than commercial. Geographical indications have become a standing subject of India’s trade negotiations, and a country that arrives at those negotiations with a functioning register, hundreds of recorded names and a documented system of specifications and authorised users negotiates from a different position than a country with grievances alone. The register is, in that setting, an inventory of claims: each registration records the product, the territory and the link in a form that can be tabled, and the reciprocity and convention provisions of the Act give the inventory legal consequence in both directions. The point should not be overstated, since a register entry is not a market outcome, but it explains a feature of Indian practice that pure producer welfare analysis cannot: the State’s sustained investment in expanding Part A even where Part B lags, because the audience for Part A includes foreign governments and foreign registries as well as Indian producers.

The verdict the evidence supports is the claim this article opened with. Registration protects the name: completely, durably and, for notified goods, at a high level of protection. Registration does not, without more, protect the producer: the producer is protected only upon the second registration in Part B, the proprietor’s system is protected only to the extent the proprietor funds it, and the producer’s income is protected only by market arrangements the GI Act does not contain. That is not a drafting failure to be lamented in the abstract; it is the statute’s actual allocation, and policy that treats the GI tag as a producer welfare instrument without attending to authorised user enrolment, proprietor capacity and the marketing chain is mistaking the perimeter for the crop.

The register in one view

The table below states the position of each actor in the system in the statute’s own terms: the proprietor entered in Part A, the producer entered in Part B, the producer entered nowhere, the trader outside the territory, and the trade mark applicant who seeks the name by the side door.

Actor	What the actor may do	The right the actor holds	The remedy or exposure the actor faces
The applicant association or authority, entered as registered proprietor in Part A	Apply for and hold the registration, maintain the specification, support authorised user applications, police the name	The right to obtain relief for infringement under Section 21, in common with authorised users; no exclusive right to use the indication on goods it does not produce	Cannot assign, license, pledge or mortgage the indication under Section 24; may face rectification under Section 27; loses the registration if renewal fails under Section 18
A producer registered as an authorised user in Part B	Use the indication on the registered goods produced within the territory and the specification	The exclusive right to use the indication under Section 21, plus the right to obtain relief for infringement; the right devolves on death to the successor in title	Must observe the conditions and limitations on the register; the registration lasts ten years or until the indication’s registration expires, whichever is earlier
A producer within the region who is not registered	Produce and sell the goods as before; apply under Section 17 to be registered as an authorised user	No right under the Act: no statutory exclusivity and no standing to sue for infringement under the Act	Depends on the proprietor and the authorised users for enforcement; market access may be conditioned by the proprietor’s certification system; retains passing off arguments only as the law otherwise allows
A trader outside the region	Trade in genuine goods lawfully acquired, subject to Section 22(4); use the truthful place of origin of the trader’s own goods	No right to use the registered indication on goods from outside the territory	Infringement under Section 22 for misleading use or unfair competition; criminal liability under Sections 39 and 40 for falsely applying the indication; opposition by the proprietor in foreign registries
A trade mark applicant using the geographical name	Apply for a mark that does not consist of the indication for goods from outside the territory; rely on good faith positions preserved by Section 26	Any trade mark validly held in good faith before the Act or the GI application remains unprejudiced	Refusal or invalidation under Section 25 where the mark contains or consists of the indication for goods not originating in the territory and its use would confuse or mislead as to origin

The table states the series verdict in tabular form. The system’s rights flow from entries in the register, and the register has two parts for a reason: Part A without Part B is a name defended in the abstract, and Part B is where the Act’s protection becomes a producer’s right.

What would have to change

The reform agenda the record suggests is administrative rather than legislative, and it is worth stating because it locates the Act’s unfinished business precisely. The first item is enrolment: authorised user registration treated as a stage of the registration project itself, with the initial list in the application built as an enrolment of the territory’s producers and with enrolment drives run by proprietors as a continuing duty rather than an afterthought. The second is proprietor capacity: the register’s custodians need the staff, the inspection credibility and the litigation budget that the Darjeeling proprietor happens to possess and most proprietors do not, and public facilitation programmes for registered products are an acknowledgment that registration alone does not build that capacity. The third is the notification power: Section 22(2) is the one place where the Act’s protection level can be raised for a product by executive choice, and a considered notification policy would give the strongest export names the higher tier that the TRIPS architecture reserves and that India’s negotiators demand abroad. None of these requires the statute to be reopened. Each accepts the design this article has described, a custodian in Part A, users in Part B, a name that cannot be sold, and asks that the design be operated at the intensity its strongest case demonstrates.

Reading the Act with its cluster

The Act rewards being read in its series order. The field it belongs to, the whole family of Indian intellectual property statutes and the treaty obligations beneath them, is the subject of the guide to intellectual property law in this series, which holds this Act at headline level by design; the trade mark system with which it shares a Registrar, a procedure and a contested frontier is the subject of the Trade Marks Act pillar that immediately precedes this article in the cluster; and the three-way contrast of the registrable rights, to which the geographical indication adds a fourth and deliberately untradeable model, is taken up by the comparison that closes the cluster. Within that company, the 1999 Act’s distinctiveness is its answer to a question the other statutes never face: how to write a property-like right for a subject, a place, that cannot own anything. Parliament’s answer was a custodian in Part A, users in Part B, a name that cannot be sold, and a producer who is protected precisely to the extent that the second register is filled. Twenty years of the register’s operation have filled Part A impressively and Part B thinly, and the distance between those two facts is the measure of the statute this article set out to explain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What qualifies as a geographical indication?

A geographical indication is an indication that identifies goods as agricultural goods, natural goods or manufactured goods as originating, or manufactured in, the territory of a country or a region or locality in that country, where a given quality, reputation or other characteristic of the goods is essentially attributable to their geographical origin. Under Section 2(1)(e), the sign may be a name, a geographical or figurative representation, or a combination; for manufactured goods, it is enough that one of the activities of production, processing or preparation takes place in the territory. A name that is not itself a place name still qualifies if it relates to a specific geographical area and is used for goods from there.

Q: Who can apply for a geographical indication?

Only a body representing producers may apply. Under Section 11, an application may be made by any association of persons or producers, or by any organisation or authority established by or under any law in force, representing the interest of the producers of the concerned goods. An individual producer, however large, cannot apply, and neither can a single trading company, because the registration belongs to the producing community of the territory and is held through its representative. The applicant is entered in Part A of the register as the registered proprietor. In practice the register’s proprietors are commodity boards such as the Tea Board, State corporations and development bodies, export promotion authorities and registered producer associations and societies.

Q: What is an authorised user and why does it matter?

An authorised user is a producer of the registered goods who has been registered as such in Part B of the register, on an application under Section 17. It matters because the Act’s usable rights attach to this entry and not to production itself. The registered authorised user holds the exclusive right to use the indication on the goods and, with the registered proprietor, the right to obtain relief for infringement under Section 21. A producer within the region whose name is not in Part B holds no right under the Act, cannot sue under it and has no statutory exclusivity, however genuine the goods are. The authorised user registration lasts ten years or until the registration of the indication expires, whichever is earlier.

Q: How long does a geographical indication last?

A geographical indication is registered for ten years, and the registration may be renewed from time to time for further periods of ten years each, without any statutory limit on the number of renewals. An authorised user’s registration runs for ten years or until the registration of the indication itself expires, whichever is earlier. If the renewal fee is not paid, the Registrar may remove the indication after notice, though payment within six months of expiry with the prescribed surcharge still secures renewal, and a removed registration can be restored on application made after six months and within one year of expiry. A removed indication is still treated as on the register for one year against later applications, subject to exceptions for want of bona fide use and absence of confusion.

Q: Can a geographical indication be assigned or licensed?

No. Section 24 provides that, notwithstanding anything in any other law, no right to a registered geographical indication may be the subject matter of assignment, transmission, licensing, pledge, mortgage or any such other agreement. The bar follows from the nature of the right: the indication’s value is essentially attributable to a territory and to the collective reputation of its producers, so permitting a sale or licence would sever the name from the place that justifies its protection and convert a community entitlement into a private asset. The single exception is in the proviso: when an authorised user dies, the right devolves on the successor in title under the law in force. Proprietors who need licensing machinery, the Tea Board for Darjeeling being the standard example, operate it through certification trade marks held alongside the registration.

Q: What protection does registration of a geographical indication give?

Registration gives the registered proprietor and the authorised users the right to obtain relief in respect of infringement, and gives the authorised user the exclusive right to use the indication in relation to the registered goods, under Section 21. Registration is prima facie evidence of its own validity under Section 23. Infringement under Section 22 covers use by a person who is not an authorised user that misleads as to geographical origin, use amounting to unfair competition including passing off, and use of another indication that, although true as to its own territory, falsely represents origin in the registered territory. Without registration there is no infringement action at all under the Act, by Section 20, though the passing off action is expressly preserved. Remedies include civil relief and the criminal offences in Sections 39 to 41.

Q: Which geographical indication goods get higher protection?

The goods or classes of goods that the Central Government specifies by notification in the Official Gazette under Section 22(2). For notified goods, Section 22(3) applies the higher tier modelled on Article 23 of the TRIPS Agreement, the tier designed for wines and spirits: use of the indication by a person who is not an authorised user infringes even where the true place of origin of the goods is indicated, even where the indication is used in translation, and even where it is accompanied by expressions such as kind, style or imitation. Ordinary registrations are protected against use that misleads; notified goods are protected against the use itself, so the notification power, rather than the registration alone, fixes the level of protection a given product enjoys.

Q: Has the geographical indications law helped producers?

The record is divided, and the division tracks the two registers. A 2025 study of the Intellectual Property India record counted 643 registered indications by 2024, and registration has plainly given proprietors standing to defend names such as Darjeeling in registries and courts at home and abroad. The same study found that only 275 of the 643 registrations had any authorised users, with approximately 29,624 authorised users in all, against producing populations far larger; Press Information Bureau figures record authorised users growing from 365 in 2015 to about 29,000 by January 2025. Registration has therefore protected names effectively while reaching only a minority of producers with rights, and the effect on producer incomes depends on proprietor capacity and the marketing chain, which the Act does not govern.

Q: What is the difference between a geographical indication and a trade mark?

A trade mark distinguishes the goods of one trader from those of others and is private property: it may be owned by an individual or a company, assigned, licensed and held as security. A geographical indication identifies goods as originating in a territory whose quality, reputation or characteristic is essentially attributable to that origin; it is held by a producer body as registered proprietor for the producing community, the usable right belongs to producers registered as authorised users, and Section 24 bars assignment, licensing, pledge and mortgage altogether. The two systems also police each other: Section 25 requires a trade mark consisting of a geographical indication for goods from outside the territory to be refused or invalidated where its use would confuse or mislead as to origin.

Q: How are rival claims by two States to the same product name resolved?

By specification rather than by verdict. The register records what each claimant can prove: a defined territory, a distinct specification of the goods and a link between the two. When West Bengal obtained registration of Banglar Rasogolla on 14 November 2017, the Registry clarified that the registration covered the Bengali variant under its specification and was not a finding that the sweet originated in Bengal. Odisha then obtained registration of Odisha Rasagola on 29 July 2019, in the name of a State corporation and a confectioners’ association, with its own specification. The two registrations coexist, much as Section 10 contemplates for homonymous indications: differentiated names, territories and conditions, so that neither claim extinguishes the other and consumers are not misled.

Q: Why are the turmeric and neem cases not geographical indication disputes?

Because they were patent cases. The turmeric patent granted in the United States on wound healing use was revoked in 1997 after the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research proved the use was part of documented prior knowledge; the European neem patent was revoked in 2000 on the same ground; and the RiceTec basmati patent of 1997 was largely withdrawn or rejected on re-examination. Each proceeding asked whether a patent should have been granted, a question of novelty and prior art. No geographical indication was registered, infringed or litigated in any of them: Basmati’s GI history is the separate Indian registration dispute over territory. The cases belong to the traditional knowledge and patent revocation record, and conflating them with GI law misstates both.

Q: What is a homonymous geographical indication, and can it be registered?

A homonymous geographical indication is a name that is identical for goods originating in different territories, a situation familiar from place names shared between regions or countries. Section 10 permits the Registrar to register such an indication for the second territory where the Registrar is satisfied that conditions can be imposed that differentiate the competing indications, having regard to the need to ensure equitable treatment of the producers of both territories and to ensure that consumers are not misled. The provision expresses the statute’s general instinct in shared name cases: coexistence under conditions that keep the two products distinguishable, rather than a contest in which the first registration wipes out an honest claim from another territory with the same name.

Q: What punishment applies for falsely applying a geographical indication to goods?

Section 39 sets the scale for the principal offences, falsifying a geographical indication, falsely applying one to goods, making or possessing instruments for falsification, applying a false indication of origin, and tampering with an origin indication made under the Act: imprisonment for a term of not less than six months and extending to three years, and a fine of not less than fifty thousand rupees and extending to two lakh rupees, though the court may impose less than the minimum for adequate and special reasons recorded in the judgment. Section 40 applies the same scale to selling or exposing for sale goods bearing a false indication, subject to defences for traders who took reasonable precautions. Section 41 raises a second or subsequent conviction to imprisonment of one to three years and a fine of one to two lakh rupees, and the court may order forfeiture of the goods.

Q: What happens to an authorised user’s right when the authorised user dies?

The right passes to the successor in title. Section 24 bars every dealing with a registered geographical indication: it may not be assigned, transmitted, licensed, pledged or mortgaged. The proviso to the section carves out the single exception, providing that where an authorised user dies, the right devolves on the successor in title under the law in force at the time. Devolution on death is therefore the only route by which the authorised user’s right moves from one person to another, and it operates by operation of the succession law rather than by any agreement. The exception fits the design: the right belongs within the producing community of the territory, and inheritance keeps it within the producer’s own line without opening a market in the name.

Q: What does a registered proprietor do when it does not itself produce the goods?

It administers the name. The registered proprietor holds the registration in Part A, maintains the specification of the goods, supports and processes the admission of producers to Part B as authorised users, and polices the indication against misuse in India and abroad. The Tea Board of India, proprietor of the Darjeeling registration, is the model: it grows no tea and runs no garden, but it operates the certification and chain of custody system for tea sold under the name, holds certification trade marks alongside the GI registration, and defends the word and logo in foreign registries and courts. A proprietor’s effectiveness is therefore institutional rather than productive, and a registration whose proprietor lacks staff, funds or market presence leaves the name defended on paper rather than in the market.

Q: Can a geographical indication from another country be registered in India?

Yes. The Act is not confined to Indian indications: a geographical indication from another country may be registered in India on application by the association, organisation or authority representing the producers of that country, provided the country is one to which the Act’s convention and reciprocity provisions extend. Foreign names, including European wines, spirits and cheeses, stand on the Indian register alongside the larger body of Indian registrations, and foreign proprietors may oppose Indian applications just as Indian proprietors do. The reciprocity rule runs the other way as well: nationals of a country that does not allow Indians to register indications there, or to claim equivalent protection, may themselves be denied registration in India, so the register also serves as an instrument of the treaty relationship between the two countries.

Q: Why does the map filed with the application matter so much?

Because the map draws the boundary of the right. Section 11 requires every application to be accompanied by a geographical map of the territory, and the registration then operates for goods originating in that demarcated area: producers inside it may seek authorised user registration, and producers outside it may not, however similar their product. The Basmati litigation shows the stakes. When Madhya Pradesh claimed thirteen districts inside the Basmati territory, the question was decided on evidence of qualities, climatic conditions and public perception, and the Assistant Registrar rejected the claim on 15 March 2018, holding that the State had not established that its rice shared the characteristics of traditional Basmati. Years of proceedings turned on where the line on the map falls, because the line decides whose rice the name covers.

Q: What happens if a registered geographical indication is not renewed?

The registration lapses and may be removed from the register. The Registrar sends notice before the ten year term expires; if the renewal fee is not paid, the Registrar may remove the indication, although payment made within six months after expiry, with the prescribed surcharge, still secures renewal. A registration removed for non-payment can be restored on application made after six months and within one year from the expiration of the last registration, on conditions the Registrar imposes. Removal does not erase the registration’s shadow at once: Section 19 treats a removed indication as still on the register for one year when later applications for a geographical indication or a trade mark are considered, unless there was no bona fide trade use in the preceding two years or the later use would cause no deception. Once protection ends, authorised users’ rights, which cannot outlive the indication’s registration, end with it.

Q: What happens to a trade mark that was already using the geographical name in good faith?

It is protected rather than extinguished. Section 26 provides that nothing in the Act prejudices the validity of registration of a trade mark applied for or registered in good faith, or rights in a trade mark acquired through use in good faith, before the commencement of the Act or before the application for the geographical indication; and the Registrar of Geographical Indications may not refuse an application for the indication merely because such a mark exists. The Act also does not apply to a geographical indication identical with a term that was customary as the common name of the goods in any part of India on or before 1 January 1995, and a person’s bona fide use of that person’s own name or place of business is preserved. Honest positions that predate the register therefore coexist with the registration instead of being retrospectively destroyed by it.

Q: Why did India enact a separate geographical indications statute instead of using trade mark law?

Because the right does not fit the trade mark mould, and because the treaty position required machinery trade mark law did not contain. The TRIPS Agreement obliged India to provide legal means against misleading geographical indications, and India sought protection for origin products, Darjeeling tea and Basmati rice among them, whose names were used freely abroad. Trade mark law offered certification marks, which the Tea Board had used, but a certification mark is private property of its owner, protects the owner’s certification system and says nothing about which producers of a region are entitled to be inside it. A separate statute allowed the right to be structured as India wanted it: held by a representative producer body, usable by producers who register as authorised users, and incapable of assignment or licensing, so that the name could never be sold away from the territory whose reputation created its value.