The Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001 (PPV&FR Act) is an Act of the Parliament of India, which received the President's assent on October 30, 2001. It was enacted to establish an effective sui generis system for the protection of new plant varieties, the rights of plant breeders, and the rights of farmers. The Act's creation was necessitated by India's commitment to the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement under the World Trade Organization (WTO), which mandates intellectual property protection for plant varieties. India chose a sui generis (unique) system, aligning with the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), 1978 model, but specifically rejecting the more restrictive UPOV 1991 version to safeguard farmers' traditional rights.
The Act works by granting intellectual property rights to breeders who develop new, distinct, uniform, and stable (DUS) plant varieties. Key provisions include the granting of exclusive rights to breeders to produce, sell, market, and distribute their registered varieties for a period of 15 years for field crops and 18 years for trees and vines. Crucially, the Act uniquely recognizes and protects Farmers' Rights, allowing them to save, use, sow, re-sow, exchange, share, or sell their farm-saved seed of a protected variety, provided they do not sell it as "branded seed". It also provides for Benefit Sharing, where a portion of the earnings from a registered variety is shared with farmers who contributed to its development.
The Act established the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Authority on November 11, 2005, under the Department of Agriculture and Cooperation, Ministry of Agriculture, to administer the Act and handle registration. The PPV&FR Act is closely connected to the broader framework of intellectual property rights in agriculture, including the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, and the international TRIPS Agreement. There have been no major recent amendments that replaced the core structure, and the dual protection of breeders' and farmers' rights remains the foundational principle.