PepsiCo registered its FL 2027 potato variety, the one grown to feed its Lay's chips line, under the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001 back in 2016. A few years later the company filed infringement suits against farmers in Gujarat whom it accused of growing FL 2027 without authorisation, a move that provoked a backlash well beyond the individual farmers named, since the suits were widely read as a large multinational using plant breeder's rights to go after small growers. Kavitha Kuruganti, a farmers' rights advocate, responded in 2019 by seeking revocation of PepsiCo's registration itself before the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Authority.
Her revocation application invoked Section 34(h) of the Act, the provision that lets the Authority cancel a registration obtained or exercised in a manner contrary to the public interest. Her case was that filing infringement suits against farmers was itself the kind of public interest violation the section contemplates, since the Act's whole architecture is meant to balance a breeder's commercial rights against farmers' traditional freedom to save, exchange and resow seed. The Authority accepted that argument and revoked PepsiCo's registration in December 2021.
PepsiCo took the revocation to the Delhi High Court. A single judge upheld the Authority's revocation in 2023, but a Division Bench reversed that in January 2024 and set the revocation aside, restoring PepsiCo's registration. Both sides then appealed to the Supreme Court, Kuruganti seeking to have the revocation reinstated and PepsiCo defending the Division Bench's restoration of its rights, which is how the matter reached a bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran for what is reported as the first Supreme Court ruling interpreting registration under the 2001 Act.
The Court sided with PepsiCo on the central question. It held that a registration cannot be revoked under Section 34(h) simply because the registered breeder went on to sue farmers for infringement, since suing to enforce a validly granted right is a different thing from having obtained or exercised that right in a manner contrary to public interest at the time the suits were filed. Revocation under that provision needs something more than the bare fact of litigation against growers, and Kuruganti's case did not establish that something more to the Court's satisfaction.
What the Court did preserve, and what the ruling's narrower, practical value turns on, is Section 39(1)(iv) of the Act, which gives farmers the right to save, use, sow, resow, exchange, share or sell farm produce including seed of a registered variety, subject to specific limits on selling branded seed of that variety. The Court clarified that this protection survives independently of whether the registration itself stands, so a farmer sued by PepsiCo or any other registered breeder can still raise Section 39(1)(iv) as a defence in that very infringement suit, regardless of the outcome of any separate revocation proceeding against the registration.
Kuruganti's reaction captured what the ruling leaves unresolved for farmers on the ground. She called it disappointing and said the Court had upheld farmers' rights in letter but not in spirit, because a farmer sued for infringement must now go into that litigation and actively establish, as a matter of proof, that the Section 39(1)(iv) exemption applies to what they did, rather than being protected by a revoked registration that would have ended the suits outright. The statutory defence exists, but using it means fighting the case rather than having the underlying registration removed as a threat before suits are even filed.
For plant variety owners, the ruling confirms that a validly obtained registration is not vulnerable to revocation merely because the owner later enforces it against farmers, which removes a significant uncertainty that had hung over breeders' willingness to sue since the 2021 revocation order. For farmers and the organisations that support them, the practical takeaway is that Section 39(1)(iv) remains a real, litigable defence in any individual infringement suit, but one that has to be proved case by case rather than relied upon as a blanket immunity flowing from the variety's registration status.