Tell you what. Let us enumerate the number of new advanced drugs that Non-Indians brought to India. That list will be long; the worst part is that all those technical drug lists may turn out to have at least one Indian working on them, our emigration is huge. To take a technical comparison, what would have happened if Satya Nadella & Sundar Pichai had stayed back over here? Anyway, that's an argument for another day.

To get back to the topic, Non-Indians may benefit from the patent regime; but they got the products here in the first place. In short, the "refutation" is a simple quid pro quo: the foreigners manufacture most drugs, and they get the most patents. There is no argument here on whether patents are bad, it is a stupid defense of an idiotic method of patent grants. Most Indian pharma firms have no meaningful R&D, they make their profits on generics. Socialists like the present government will never understand a free market, if they want these expensive drugs for free, they have to pay for them somehow. Not by abusing a bad patent system which is protectionist. Either they should abolish patents (which is the best way) and take the results, or they start applying patents the ostensible way they are meant to be applied, which is to pay attention to whether the pharma breakthrough is big enough to merit a patent, or not.