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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2021
In early 2013, the Indian Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation, under supervision of the Health Secretary, introduced new rules governing the conduct of clinical trials involving human participants. Among other provisions, the rules require that sponsors of research compensate participants who are injured during the course of their research participation. The rules presumably were drafted to protect citizens from harm caused by biomedical research without unduly restricting access to the benefits that research can provide. While requiring compensation for injury is widely-acknowledged as a critical component of ensuring ethical conduct of human subjects research, in this case the legal restrictions do not match the ethical justifications that support a compensation requirement. To see this, it is important to examine the context in which the rules were written, the justifications for rules of this type, and what mechanisms are available to bring the effects of the rules into alignment with the norms their passage sought to promote.