Our Corporate Bureau

Mumbai, Nov 5: India is ranked fourth among the developing countries in terms of the number of patent applications filed under PCT (patent cooperation treaty) during the first nine months of the current fiscal.

Indian inventors had filed around 248 applications under PCT for the period upto September 2001 for the current year, while Republic of Korea and China held the first two slots with 1,714 and 1,085 applications, respectively, followed by South Africa for the same period. This was stated by World Intellectual Property Organisation officials at a seminar on PCT filing training programme .

PCT is an international patent filing system, which enables filing invention with single patent office on a single application in one language. Its objective is to simplify and render effective and economical service to the users of the patent systems.