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: the Tata Group companies is 222, indicating poor patent-filing activity, if one takes into account its economic strength. The report quoted Ratan Tata, the Chairman of the Tata Group as saying that the Group was “not doing enough in terms of really generating intellectual property rights (IPRs), really getting involved in R&D as against just product development.”

India vs China

If one were to do the usual comparison with China on patent activity as in other fields, India and its homegrown firms are way behind. The State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) received 2,45,161 invention patent applications in 2007, of which domestic applicants filed over 62.4%, the report says. “In contrast, a total of 24,505 applications were filed at the IPO in 2005–06, of which domestic applications filed were 4,855 (approximately 20%) and foreign applications filed were 19,650 (approximately 80%),” it points out. The number of patent applications filed in 2006-07 in China was 2,10,490, while in India the number was 28,882. When it comes to the granting of patents, China had a total of 57,786 as compared to 7,539 in India.

In a bid to match China’s pace, India announced plans to launch an Intellectual Property Awareness Sensitisation and Consultancy Programme costing around $5 million, by roping in universities, laboratories, state level chambers of commerce and industry, patent attorneys and the scientific community.

Minister of state for industry, Ashwani Kumar had said that the proactive campaign would establish a correlation between intellectual property, innovation, productivity and competitiveness. The minister said the objective of the programme was to take the intellectual property regime to the bottom of the industrial pyramid and invigorate the proprietary rights culture in the country.

As per World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), a UN agency that specialises in developing an accessible international intellectual property system, of the total 1.56 lakh applications of international patents it received, China came seventh with 5,456 applications. US topped the list with 52,280 applications, followed by Japan with 27,731. Compared to this, India’s applications were a paltry 686. In 2006, when China filed 3,951 applications, India filed just 831.