Amidst much fanfare, the Indian government unleashed an Intellectual Property Rights (“IPR”) policy around two years ago. This paper aims at the first ever comprehensive assessment of this policy, its purported rationale and implications. It argues that the policy is a shoddily drafted and poorly conceptualised document, which is resting on empirically unproven intellectual property (“IP”) assumptions. It is more faith-based than fact-based and endorses a fairly formalistic view of IP, taking it to be an end in itself