Ganesh Hingmire v. PRADA (2025): who can sue for a Kolhapuri Chappal GI, and why a PIL won't do

In June 2025, a luxury fashion house showing its collection in Milan collided with a registered Indian geographical indication, and the dispute that followed reached the Bombay High Court not as a suit but as a public interest litigation. The result, in Prof. Adv. Ganesh S. Hingmire v. PRADA Group, was a dismissal — but a dismissal that says something precise about who is entitled to enforce a GI, and through which door. The Division Bench of Alok Aradhe, C.J. and Sandeep V. Marne, J. (the judgment marked "Per Sandeep V. Marne, J.") declined to let the PIL stand, holding that the enforcement architecture of the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act 1999 cannot be bypassed by a writ in public interest.

The facts in brief

The Kolhapuri Chappal is among India's better-known registered geographical indications. It is registered with the GI Registry in Class 25 (Footwear) under registration No. 169, by a certificate dated 4 May 2009 and valid up to 2029. Its registered proprietors are two State-owned corporations: LIDCOM — the Sant Rohidas Leather Industries and Charmakar Development Corporation Ltd, a Maharashtra Government corporation — and LIDKAR — the Dr. Babu Jagjivan Ram Leather Industries Development Corporation Ltd, a Karnataka Government corporation. In the proceeding, LIDCOM was impleaded as Respondent No. 4; LIDKAR was not impleaded at all.

The trigger was a fashion show. Prada (Respondent No. 1, of Milan, with its Indian subsidiary as Respondent No. 2) held its Spring/Summer Men's Collection in Milan on 22 June 2025 and introduced "Toe Ring Sandals" that the petitioners said were deceptively similar to Kolhapuri Chappals, reportedly priced at over Rs 1,00,000. The petitioners pleaded that the designers had not acknowledged any Kolhapuri inspiration at the event.

The petition was filed by six advocates in public interest. The reliefs they sought were sweeping: an injunction restraining Prada's use of the GI; a court-approved public apology on affidavit, to be circulated through the media; a permanent injunction together with compensation to the artisans; an investigation; licensing guidelines for international brands; the constitution of a committee for the protection of GIs in international markets; and costs.

The questions

Beneath the headline-grabbing facts, the case turned on three linked questions of maintainability. First, locus standi: could advocates who were neither the registered proprietors nor authorised users of the GI — and who were not otherwise aggrieved — maintain the action at all? Second, the choice of remedy: where the GI Act itself supplies a civil remedy for infringement, can that private, statutory right be vindicated instead through a PIL under Article 226 of the Constitution? Third, the suitability of the forum: can disputed questions of fact — here, whether Prada's sandals were similar enough to amount to infringement — be adjudicated in a writ proceeding, and does a PIL even lie against a private entity such as Prada, which is not an instrumentality of the State?

What the Court held

The PIL was dismissed. The Court grounded its reasoning in the statutory scheme of the GI Act 1999. Under Section 21, the right to relief for infringement vests in the registered proprietor and the authorised user or users of a geographical indication; Section 22 defines what constitutes infringement; and Section 11 governs who may apply for registration in the first place. Read together, these provisions locate the entitlement to sue, and the proper vehicle for doing so — a civil suit under the Act — in a defined and limited class of persons.

The advocates who brought the petition were not within that class. Nor, the Court noted, were the registered proprietors helpless. LIDCOM and LIDKAR are government corporations "well equipped" with "the necessary wherewithal" to protect their rights, and it had not even been pleaded that they were incapable of doing so. Against that backdrop, the Bench drew the line that gives the case its name:

The Court reinforced this conclusion with two further strands. It applied the parameters governing public interest litigation laid down in BALCO Employees' Union v. Union of India (2002) 2 SCC 333, and relied on Environment and Consumer Protection Foundation v. Union of India (2017) 16 SCC 780 and Jaipur Shahar Hindu Vikas Samiti v. State of Rajasthan (2014) 5 SCC 530 for the proposition that where a statutory mechanism exists, parties must be relegated to the appropriate forum. And it added a distinct ground rooted in the nature of the dispute: questions of similarity and infringement involve disputed questions of fact that require evidence, so an infringement action — in the Court's words — "cannot be brought by way of a petition filed under Article 226 of the Constitution of India."

Critically, the Court preserved the real remedy rather than extinguishing it. It made clear that the dismissal of the petition "shall not come in the way of registered proprietors of GI in Kolhapuri Chappal to initiate action against PRADA in accordance with law, if they so desire." The PIL failed; the proprietors' statutory suit, if they choose to bring one, remains entirely open.

Analysis

The significance of Hingmire lies in how cleanly it separates a public grievance from a private statutory right. The Kolhapuri Chappal episode generated genuine public sentiment — a globally registered Indian craft tradition apparently echoed, unacknowledged, on a Milan runway at a luxury price point. That sentiment is what the six advocates sought to channel into a court. But sentiment, however widely shared, is not the test the GI Act applies. The Act builds a specific enforcement structure: it identifies who holds the GI (the registered proprietors), who may use it (authorised users), who is entitled to sue when it is infringed (Section 21), what infringement means (Section 22), and who may seek registration (Section 11). Standing to enforce flows from that structure, not from the public's interest in the outcome.

The Court's reasoning is, at bottom, a relegation move. Where the legislature has created a complete civil remedy and vested it in identified persons, a constitutional court will ordinarily send the matter to that remedy rather than annex it to writ jurisdiction. That is the through-line in BALCO, Environment and Consumer Protection Foundation, and Jaipur Shahar Hindu Vikas Samiti: a PIL is not a residual all-purpose remedy that displaces a working statutory forum. The point is sharpened by who the proprietors are. Because LIDCOM and LIDKAR are government corporations with the means to act, there was no argument that the registered owners were so disabled that public-spirited outsiders had to step in — a factual gap the Court expressly noted.

The second ground — disputed questions of fact — is equally consequential and somewhat independent of standing. Even setting aside who brought the petition, a charge of GI infringement asks whether one product is deceptively similar to another. That is an evidentiary inquiry: comparison, expert material, the apparatus of a trial. Writ proceedings under Article 226 are not built for it. So the infringement question was unsuited to the PIL twice over — wrong party, and wrong forum for the kind of dispute it was.

What the judgment pointedly does not do is decide whether Prada infringed. The Court resolved the matter on standing and forum, and stopped there. It did not grant or address the requested apology on the merits, and there is no in-record apology by Prada in the order. The merits of the similarity allegation — the very question the petitioners cared about most — are left for the proprietors to pursue, if they choose, through the suit the Act provides.

Why it matters

For practitioners, Hingmire clarifies the enforcement architecture of the GI Act 1999 in a way that will recur whenever an Indian GI is allegedly exploited abroad or by a private brand. Standing to sue for infringement is confined to registered proprietors and authorised users under Section 21, and the route is the statutory civil suit, not a writ. A PIL under Article 226 is not a substitute for that suit — least of all where the proprietors are capable bodies fully able to act for themselves. The decision also restates two durable maintainability principles: a PIL will not lie where an adequate statutory forum already exists, and fact-heavy infringement disputes are ill-suited to writ adjudication.

The case is therefore best read as a jurisdictional and standing decision rather than a GI-merits decision. It leaves untouched the question of whether Prada's sandals actually infringed the Kolhapuri Chappal GI, while drawing a firm line about who may litigate that question and where — the right to enforce belongs to the holder of the right, exercised through the remedy the statute prescribes.

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Sources

• Official judgment PDF, Prof. Adv. Ganesh S. Hingmire v. PRADA Group (2025:BHC-AS:29310-DB) — https://images.assettype.com/barandbench/2025-07-17/vzhj0fwb/Prof_Adv_Ganesh_S_Hingmire_v_PRADA_Group_and_Ors.pdf
• Bar & Bench, "Bombay High Court rejects PIL alleging luxury brand Prada copied Kolhapuri chappals" — https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/bombay-high-court-rejects-pil-alleging-luxury-brand-prada-copied-kolhapuri-chappals