When Collective Heritage Meets Private Branding: Rethinking The GI–Trademark Divide Across South India

Abstract

India's Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999 (“GI Act”) was conceived as a collective, community-oriented intellectual property regime, standing in doctrinal contrast to the individually exclusionary logic of the Trade Marks Act, 1999. This paper tests that theoretical distinction against practice by examining nine geographically rooted product industries across all five South Indian states with significant GI activity Karnataka (Mysore Silk, Mysore Sandal Soap, Mysore Pak, Channapatna toys), Tamil Nadu (Kancheepuram Silk), Kerala (Aranmula Kannadi), Andhra Pradesh (Tirupati Laddu, Kondapalli toys) and Telangana (Pochampally Ikat) supported by a comparative doctrinal survey of certification marks, collective marks, and the pre-GI-Act common-law passing-off jurisprudence culminating in the Darjeeling Tea Board's own litigation experience. Drawing on statutory text, registration records, government and industry sources, and reported case law including R.S. Praveen Raj v. Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, the HYCO Pochampally passing-off dispute, the Aranmula Kannadi authenticity contest, and Tea Board, India v. ITC Limited, the paper argues that Indian GI protection across the southern industrial belt has repeatedly produced one of four outcomes: capture by a single corporate or institutional proprietor functioning as a de facto trademark owner; an undefended protection gap for genuinely diffuse heritage names; doctrinally correct collective ownership without the institutional capacity to translate legal recognition into market protection; or a nominally collective instrument whose own enforcement reach turns out, on litigation, to be narrower than assumed. The paper concludes with a structural diagnosis and a set of institutional reforms aimed at closing the gap between the GI Act's collective aspiration and its private-branding reality.