I.P.MUKERJI, J. - (1.) EACH of the plaintiff companies ("the plaintiff") is a pharmaceutical company. It sells various medicinal products under different brand names. They are a group. They call themselves the Mankind Group. The second defendant was the Sales Manager of their Ahmedabad division in Gujrat. The third defendant is his wife. The first defendant is a company promoted by the husband and the wife.
(2.) THIS defendant company started selling eleven or twelve medicinal products, under eleven different trade marks, in the market. Although the marks are eleven, the medicinal products are twelve. A table showing the twelve products and the eleven marks is set out below: JUDGEMENT_324_TLCAL0_2014.htm One will notice that the mark KEP of the Mankind Group is also used with slight variation by the defendants by the marks KEP -X and KEP -D.
(3.) WHAT is shell shocking is that one brand is used to sell two different medicinal preparations, one by the plaintiff and the other by the defendants. This is the case with four brands tabulated in the second part of the table above. The effect of this is disastrous. Take the brand AMOKAV. The composition of the plaintiff's drug helps in reduction of hypertension whereas the composition of the defendants' drug is a powerful antibiotic used for many purposes. If a physician just wrote AMOKAV in the prescription there was every likelihood of the wrong drug being handed out by the pharmacist. I had pointed out the public danger in the sale of these kinds of drugs in the interim order made by me in this application on 8th November 2013, apart from the utter confusion that would be caused in the trade.;