Half-life of Indian Patents is lost during processing

New Delhi, May 25 (KNN) In India processing of a patent application takes an average of 8 to 10 years. As life of a patent, the period during which the patent holder has exclusive right of use of the process / technology, is about 20 years, only half of the life of a Patent, is available for exclusive use by the patent holder.

While lamenting for the long delay in processing of patents in India, a senior Government officer assured the Industry Bodies recently, that the mission of the Government is to bring down the patent processing time to 18 months through the new Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy.

De facto, an Indian patent holder gets patent right of only 10 years, whereas an innovator in a developed country has  a much longer period of rights, due to the fast processing of the patent applications.

So, no surprise that though having the world’s 2nd largest pool of engineers and scientists, number of patents applied in India is much lower than many other countries.

Briefing on the action initiated by the Government to ‘ease’ patent filing and processing process, the senior officer of Ministry of Industry of Commerce mentioned that Government has increased the number of patent examiners by fourfold, to expedite the patent processing time.

Government is also setting up a Centre for Innovation and Patent Management (CIPAM) for implementation of the IPR policy to make the innovation support regime world class.

In developed economies, innovators starting from high end researchers of industries or academies to innovators in ‘garages’ earn by patenting their innovations and selling them with hefty margins or from royalty of the licensed patents.

On the contrary, In India, the patent registration process is prolonged and painful and when the patent is issued, there is hardly any mechanism for its trading and licensing, on a larger scale.

The new IPR policy mentions that the CIPAM shall also  endeavour to provide a platform for IPR owners and users of IPRs by acting as a facilitator for creators and innovators to be connected with potential users, buyers and funding agencies.

The policy also talk of undertake a study to examine the feasibility of an IPR Exchange.

However, typical to Government functioning in India, the authors of the new IPR policy made no effort to capture the developments already happened.

For example, FISME the national federation of Indian MSMEs has already started an online IPR exchange where small innovators may upload their patents and trade it with interested buyers.

What Government needed was to interact with such innovative organisations, learn from the experience, do de-bugging  and then scale up both vertically and horizontally. (KNN/ DB)