Patent Literacy: Why India Is Lagging Behind

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: The Supplement of the TIFAC (Technology Information, Forecasting & Assessment Council) IPR Bulletin (Vol 7 No 7-9 July - September 2003) has listed 885 patent applications filed in India, cleared for processing and hence placed for Opposition as per approved practice of the Government of India.

Out of these applications, around 350 are filed by Indian individual inventors/public funded R&D units/industries; a good number of them from public-funded R&D units like CSIR and DRDO and only a few from established big industries including BHEL, IOC, SAIL, etc in the public sector or Reliance, TISCO, SPIC, etc in the private sector.

When one looks at the latest USPTO data (last week of March 2004) on patents granted to non-US countries, one is in for a greater shock with India getting 7 patents (bulk being for CSIR), with countries such as Korea 93, UK 77, Taiwan 144, Canada 75, France 85, Japan 745 and so on, with China also only at 15.

When one analyses the data for IT, the ground reality is even worse with the major Indian players including TCS, Wipro and Infosys yet to make any imprint at all, with a newspaper report describing the recent situation merely as “It is patent mania for US co’s local units.” In other words, even after a five decades long post-independent development followed now by a decade long additional promotional efforts since the signing of the WTO/TRIPS Agreement, Indian R&D of ’possible industrial use’ has “Miles to Go” to emerge even as a reasonable player in the field, with the TRIPS-compliant patent regime straightaway only reinforcing the hold of the foreign agencies in extending their IP monopolies to this country as well.

With nearly 30 per cent of the 50 major industries in the country now owned in terms of their marketisation assets by foreign agencies, as reported recently in a recent newspaper report, the future of indigenous industrial R&D itself could lose its ’ability for autonomous working.’It is well known that the developed countries of the West have used patents and patenting practices as instruments in promoting scientific-technological development integral with their development policies and programmes.