India Business Law Journal – February 2026

A whiff of change

IP authorities open the door to trademarks for scents

Trademarks have enabled businesses to distinguish their brands, and for consumers to identify them in a busy marketplace. Words, logos, colours and shapes have long been familiar signposts of commercial identity. Brand recognition is no longer confined to what the eye can see. Sound, texture and even movement have slowly but steadily entered the legal conversation, reflecting how modern consumers experience brands with more than just sight.

Smell, however, has remained an elusive frontier with a few exceptions like Australia, the UK and Canada, which have permitted it. Unlike a new logo or jingle, it is difficult to describe scent with precision, and notoriously hard to reproduce it with a degree of consistency. As a result, olfactory trademarks have been treated with caution, often rejected by authorities as abstract and impractical.

Our Cover story, titled Sniffing an opportunity, looks at how IP authorities have taken a decisive step into this uncertain terrain. In December 2025, the Trade Marks Registry accepted the country’s first smell trademark, granting protection to a rose-scented tyre developed by Japan’s Sumitomo Rubber Industries.

The decision marks an expansion of Indian trademark law into fully multisensory branding, aligning it, in principle, with foreign jurisdictional developments. Behind the celebratory headlines lies a dense legal and practical debate about distinctiveness, graphical representation and enforceability. Can a scent truly function as a badge of origin? Where does trademark protection end and patent-like monopolisation begin? And how meaningful is registration when infringement may be nearly impossible to prove? The article examines how India arrived at its first smell mark, why this particular application succeeded where others failed, and whether the promise of olfactory trademarks can translate into real-world protection or remain a perfunctory symbolic achievement.

For our feature titled Strength through adversity, we sat down with Priti Suri, the president-elect of the Inter-Pacific Bar Association (IPBA). As a first-generation lawyer, Suri has been running her own firm for more than 20 years. Several milestones later, she now talks to us about her journey and the road ahead. What underlined it all was her belief that no challenge was too big to overcome, and in fact, she appreciated the challenges.

Whether it is dealing with a congenital deformity affecting her limbs (and people’s perceptions of this), or going abroad to study and work as a young Indian female lawyer, or setting up her own firm in India at a time when there were very few women in the profession, Suri relished the challenges.

During the course of her 35-year-long professional journey, Suri still looks forward to the next challenge that life will present. We hope our readers, particularly those attending the IPBA, enjoy reading this inspiring story.

Where challenges are concerned, decoding the budget presented for the upcoming fiscal year in the Indian parliament, on 1 February, is always a big one. This year, tax experts from BMR Legal break down what the budget means for businesses in India in our feature titled Rock steady.

In the present uncertain market conditions, the authors believe the budget for FY2026-27 offers a stabilising influence, prioritising the country’s long-term growth with emphasis on public capital expenditure, manufacturing competitiveness, infrastructure development, and the deepening of the financial sector. With reforms for the ease of doing business in India, streamlining tax administration and incorporation of emerging technologies, the budget signals the transition to trust-based tax governance.

Finally, our customary annual feature on billing rates has received a significant update this year, and we proudly present the Legal Fees Index (LFI). Participation by small and medium-sized firms remains strong, while large firms continue to guard their hourly billing figures with the closeness of a trade secret. The LFI allows readers to take a more holistic view of legal fees charged by law firms in the past 10 years. The index breaks down how fees have changed by law firm size, their location in the country, and the seniority of their lawyers.

To make the LFI more rounded, the article takes a snapshot of how clients feel about the services and rates of their legal advisers. Interestingly, clients are aware that good value from law firms does not always equate to low fees.

They instead define value as receiving pragmatic, business-focused advice from responsive lawyers who have the ability to deliver outcomes efficiently within agreed budgets. The trend of a prevalence of alternative billing methods is also raised again, and reveals how fixed-fee arrangements are increasingly becoming the norm.

IBLJ will continue to update the index on an annual basis so the story of how legal fees change can continue to be told.