From an Ars Technica article. Any rephrasing I do won't do it justice:

Cipla manufactures generic copies of Western drugs and sells them in the developing world at around 5% of the price that Western companies charge for the same medications. [...] Almost all of the drugs that Cipla copies are aimed at treating or preventing diseases that are epidemic in the Third World—diseases like AIDS, Hepatitis, etc. Cipla and the many other members of the Indian pharmaceutical industry who also engage in this same practice make these life-saving drugs available at prices that the poor in the developing world can actually afford.

The American and European pharmaceutical industries have been trying to shut down this drug cloning practice for years, an attempt that's made all the more nauseating by the fact that the Western originals of the drugs in question are priced way too high for these markets anyway. In other words, Big Pharma isn't losing much business to Cipla, because the people who buy Cipla's generics could never afford the originals. Cipla even voluntarily offered to pay Western companies a percentage of the sales of the generics, but the offer was turned down.

[...]India would be up a creek in 2010 when India comes up for WTO membership. At that point, their patent laws would have to be harmonized with those of the other WTO members, which would mean that India would have to start recognizing patents on health and food technologies, technologies that aren't covered by India's current IP regime. Well, the time has come for India to start the harmonization process, and things are proceeding apace on that front.

[...]India has quietly adopted software patents, and this week the lower house of the India pairlament took yet another step in the WTO's direction by approving legislation to recognize international patents on health and food technologies. The writing is now on the wall for the Indian drug industry, and for the millions of people around the globe whose lives depend on Indian generics. When this legislation passes the upper house, and it almost certainly will, the Indian drug industry will have to halt production of these cheap generics, and it'll be game over for anybody who can't afford to pay twenty times the price for the same medication.