Giant leap forward in patent applications: India keeps promises yet has miles to go

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s latest (2022) statistical country profile for India shows patent applications have shot up, from 22,476 in 2014 to 56,396 in 2022. That’s quite a sharp increase and applications by residents have especially shot up. In terms of patent applications, India now has a global rank of seventh. These are of course applications, not grants. (30,490 patents were granted in 2022.) It is fair to say India’s patent culture is changing and that’s mirrored, to a lesser degree, in numbers for trademarks and industrial designs. (Because of definitional problems, WIPO data don’t exactly match numbers from the Indian patent office, but differences are marginal.) There are different ways to gauge India’s performance on Intellectual Property Rights. Normalisation by population doesn’t make sense. But one can look at the absolute number of patents. Indian metrics have improved, but compared to the US, China, Japan and Korea, there is a long way to go. China’s numbers are of course influenced by utility patents, which require a weaker test than for patents, and it is best for India not to tread that route, as it hasn’t so far. There are obvious problems that constrain development of the ecosystem, such as excessive time taken to examine applications, to which, a relative human resource shortage contributes. Incidentally, there is a fast track system for women applicants, a fact some people are unaware of. There are different types of IPRs – copyright and neighbouring rights, trademarks, patents, industrial designs, geographical indications, plant varieties and integrated circuits. Plus, undisclosed information will be protected in some form. While duration and nature of protection will differ from one type of IPR to another, post-WTO, principles have been unified. However, historically, international agreements on literary and artistic works and industrial property have developed through two distinct channels – Berne Convention (1886) for the former and Paris Convention (1883) for the latter. I suspect we still have ambivalence between these two forms. All IPR protection confers limited monopoly, to encourage creativity and innovation. Like the apocryphal story of Columbus and the egg, once an act of creativity has materialised, it is easy to mimic it. Many of us probably think IPR protection for literary and artistic works is immoral, though we accept it for industrial property. After all, industry is supposed to be about commercialisation and money. Intellectual work is delinked from Mammon. Witness the alacrity with which we will watch a pirated film, or buy a pirated book. Though price is a determining factor, we are less likely to do that with a fake brand. There are many biographies of Jagadish Chandra Bose. A couple (Kunal Ghosh and Meher Wan) have been published recently. But one of the best is the fairly old one by Patrick Geddes. All these books tell us something most of us know. The 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun “in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy”. Jagadish Chandra Bose’s experiments in Presidency College (Kolkata) led him to invent a specific coherer (others invented other types of coherers), a critical component for wireless telegraphy. Jagadish Chandra Bose didn’t quite invent the radio, but almost did. He refused to take out a patent on the coherer and indeed, openly demonstrated its construction and use. Everyone was free to adopt, adapt and use it, even if it was for purposes of filthy lucre. To quote Eddes, Jagadish Chandra Bose thought it was against his character and conviction to obtain “personal advantage from his inventions”. I suspect biographers need to do their research better, since Jagadish Chandra Bose did get a US patent in 1904 for “a galena semiconductor crystal detector for microwaves”. WIPO’s statistical profile tells us 5.3 per cent of India’s patent applications were from universities. Universities are meant to teach and undertake research. What form does research output take? Seminars/conferences (like Bose at the Royal Society) and publications. When one applies for IPR protection, one places the creative work and innovation in the public domain, so that others can carry forward the frontiers of human knowledge. In return, one is granted that limited monopoly. However, in seminars/conferences and publications, one does that without applying for IPR protection. The nature of an academic paper in a journal is that it is placed in the public domain, by default. That tension between the Berne and Paris channels continues. What are incentive structures for universities and research institutions, for entry and vertical movement upwards? They are publications and citations. In traditional academia, I know of no place where patenting is a criterion for either entry or vertical mobility. If one looks at break-ups of applications for patents, trademarks and designs, other than the corporate sector, one will find CSIR. Perhaps CSIR has changed its incentive structure. IPR performance feeds into rankings like Global Innovation Index. There is no denying Research and Development is important, though someone should clearly separate ‘Research’ from ‘Development’. While this can and should happen through the private sector, there are question marks about whether the ecosystem facilitates it in academia, much of which are public. The author is the chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Council and a well-known Sanskrit scholar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.