What do a rising number of patents mean for a country? Simply put, they indicate a growing appetite and capacity for innovation. Indians are inventing more. Establishing intellectual property rights (IPR) over original ideas, products and services is, therefore, crucial in today’s world. Over the past few years, India has reformed its patenting processes and made intellectual property rights more accessible to its people, whose ambitions and entrepreneurial fervour are both witnessing an upswing. Just over the past 10 months, the Indian Patent Office (IPO) has granted a record 75,000 fresh patents. This follows an established trend of patent grants witnessing a rise each year.
Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Piyush Goyal, says the patent boom is a consequence of the government eliminating and simplifying around 40,000 compliances across the country in order to release the burden on entrepreneurs and innovators and promote ease of doing business among them. He mentioned the Jan Vishwas law as being the first step to harness India’s innovative abilities by decriminalising and rationalising certain offences. The result, according to Goyal, has been a boost for trust-based governance and ease of doing business in India.
The government has been anticipating a continued patent boom in India and has even set goals for itself. Last September, Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, said India will soon have the capability to issue 100,000 patents in a year.
One must appreciate how far India has come in terms of granting new patents over the past few years. Up until 2016, for instance, India used to issue only 9,000 patents a year. Today, India is granting over 75,000 fresh patents within 10 months. Given the trajectory, India’s goal of issuing 1 lakh new patents every year will be achieved soon enough as well.
The rapid rate at which new patents are now being processed and granted is a result of a slew of reforms undertaken by the government, and also an expansion of capacity in terms of processing patents. Sanyal, for example, pointed out how the government last year was in the process of hiring around 500 new patent officers.
India’s Patent Boom is Only Getting Started
The numbers look promising. Up until 2021, India was at the fifth position globally in terms of trademark filings. According to the latest World Intellectual Property Indicators report, in 2022, India rose to the third position, behind only the United States and China. An important phenomenon which has been noticed in India is that more residents and ordinary people are now filing patents, buoyed by reforms and heightened awareness of IPR.
Earlier, the Indian patenting scene was dominated largely by corporate houses, especially multinational companies. In the current fiscal, resident applications account for more than half, or 52.3 per cent of the total applications. In 2016-17, the share of resident applications stood at just 29 per cent. This reflects a growing appetite for innovation among ordinary Indians.
The MSME sector is also contributing significantly to India’s patent boom. In 2022-23, the number of patent applications filed by MSMEs jumped 28.4 per cent from the previous fiscal. This shows that awareness of intellectual property rights is rising, and so is the MSME sector’s innovation.
In 2022, patent applications by Indians grew by 31.6 per cent to 55,718. This was the fastest increase since 2005. According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the rise in India’s patent applications extended an 11-year run of growth that remains “unmatched” by any other country among the top 10 patent-filing nations.
In fact, for the five years leading up to 2022, patent grants in India tripled while filing of intellectual property claims rose by 30 per cent. India still has a long way to go though. The number of people filing for new patents in countries like China and the US is far more. In 2022, China received over 1.6 million patent filings, while the US received close to 800,000.
India still needs to resolve some issues with its patenting process. For starters, the average pendency time in India for a patent stood at 4.3 years as of 2022, compared to 2 years in the US and 1.4 years in China. The government is looking to address the capacity vacuum by going on a hiring spree for the Indian Patent Office, and by 2025-26, the total manpower of the patent office will double to 1,961 controllers and examiners.
Reform, Popularise & Expand: Modi Government’s Mantra Driving India’s Patent Surge
As mentioned earlier, the growing share of individual resident Indians and MSME players filing for patents is indicative of a trend. This trend has a lot to do with Indians’ growing risk-taking appetite that leads them to innovate and invent. The other big factor driving the patent surge is a heightened awareness among the public on the issue of intellectual property rights. This awareness has not emerged out of the blue. It is the product of a sustained awareness campaign that has been going on for quite some time now.
While the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has conducted more than 50 awareness programmes during the past three years, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has conducted over 84 awareness programmes and seminars on the subject, including two international workshops.
Separately, the MSME Ministry conducted 40 awareness programmes, 1 national-level workshop, 10 IP Yatras, and 13 World IP Day programmes until July last year. Also in 2023, the ministry launched an MSME Innovative Scheme with a combination of existing sub-schemes around incubation, design, and intellectual property rights. This was done with the goal of promoting a sense of innovation and confidence throughout the value chain.
It is important to point out that having a robust patenting system is part of a broader push by the Modi government to not just foster domestic innovation but to also attract investments and position India as a hub for research & development (R&D) as well as manufacturing. To make it easier for international players to invest, manufacture and innovate in India, the Centre is working to sort out issues related to data localisation and patent laws in real-time.
The transformation on the Indian patent scene began in earnest only in 2016, which was when the Modi government introduced the Start-Ups Intellectual Property Protection (SIPP) initiative. SIPP helps start-ups in filing and processing their patents through the assistance of IP Facilitators.
Similarly, initiatives such as the National IPR Policy, IP Mitra, National Intellectual Property Awareness Mission (NIPAM) and Kalam Program for Intellectual Property Literacy and Awareness Campaign (KAPILA) are playing a crucial role in popularising the concept of IP and raising awareness on how Indians should go about protecting products of their innovation and hard work.
The cumulative impact of these initiatives has been that India’s rank in the Global Innovation Index has leapfrogged from 81st in 2015 to 40th as of 2023!
In July last year, News18 had reported that the Centre is working on devising a uniform system of valuation of an IP as an intangible asset, which will ensure a better evaluation of assets by financial institutions and derive a mechanism to recognise and appoint IP evaluators. This will mark a revolutionary change in India’s IP financing journey, and help in making credit easily available, raising capital and promoting financial innovation in the country.
India’s patent surge signifies a remarkable transformation, fuelled by government initiatives and a burgeoning entrepreneurial spirit. While challenges persist, the goal of doubling the patent office’s workforce and ongoing awareness campaigns bode well for the future. Remember, India has a long way to go if it wishes to catch up with the likes of China and the US in terms of patents processed every year. That being said, there can be no doubt that today, Indians are innovating and inventing much more. An innovative, ambitious and entrepreneurial society is crucial for India to go from being a developing nation to a “Viksit” one.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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