MOSCOW: : India and Russia have reached a broad agreement on an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) pact to protect their defence secrets.

"The text has been drafted and accepted," the Defence Secretary, Ajay Vikram Singh, said on Tuesday.

He is leading an inter-agency delegation of the Defence Ministry, the armed forces and research and development officials to discuss some outstanding issues in the agreement.

The absence of an IPR accord threatened to become a major irritant in bilateral relations. Last November, Russia's Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov, accused India of dragging its feet over the pact and warned of stopping transfer of cutting-edge defence technologies unless the agreement was signed early.

"Now that we are moving from the buyer-seller relationship to joint development and production of weapon systems, it becomes important to properly protect the high-end defence technologies against any leakage," Mr. Singh told the Indian media. He cited the Brahmos anti-ship missile as an example of jointly developed technologies, and said more such projects were on the anvil. Though all recent defence deals contained IPR provisions, Russia wanted the Indian Government, rather than the defence companies, to provide IPR guarantees, the Defence Secretary said.

During the visit of the President, Vladimir Putin, to India in December 2004, the two sides undertook to sign the agreement within four months, but the timeframe has been extended to six months.

Sticky issue

It has been agreed that the accord will apply only to new deals, and will not have a retrospective effect. However, it will define principles for procuring spares for and upgrading the Soviet-made hardware still in service of the Indian armed forces. This is understood to be a sticky issue. Russia, which has been objecting to India buying spares and modernisation technologies from third countries, would like the accord to ban India from turning to other suppliers when the original Russian manufacturers can provide support.

India agrees to give preference to Russian suppliers, but on condition that they make deliveries within reasonable time and price. India also suggests that Russia sort out the IPR issue with former Soviet countries, which claim they have as much right to make Soviet-era weapons and spares as Russia has.

Besides the delegation-level talks on the agreement, the Defence Secretary had a 100-minute meeting with Mr. Ivanov to discuss his proposal for rationalising the structure of Indo-Russian Inter-Government Commission on Defence Cooperation. India proposed more frequent meetings of the IGC sub-groups on specific subjects.

Mr. Singh also proposed that military-to-military cooperation be intensified through more joint exercises and by enlarging their scope to cover all three services. Later this year, India and Russia would stage joint naval and paratrooper war games.

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