Wait time for patent examination to be cut to 18 months by March 2018

Current wait time for patents is at 48 months

In a major relief from the long wait for getting patents examined, the government is confident of reducing the time taken for examining patents to 18 months from the current 48 months.

The reduction will be in place by March 2018, Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Thursday, speaking at the annual Intellectual Property Awards by industry body CII.

Earlier this month, Sitharaman had informed the Parliament that as of March 1, 2017, as many as 2,47,824 patent applications and 7,53,471 trademark applications were pending at various stages of examination.

The government had instituted an IPR policy back in May last year, with the aim of boosting India's patent filings. Subsequently, from around 2,62,000 applications filed in 2014-15, over 3,40,000 applications were filed in the following year, Commerce Ministry data showed. Most of these related to trademarks. Patent filings saw a 10 per cent surge with 48,904 filings in 2015-16, after hovering around 43,000 for the last five years.

Samsung R&D Institute filed the highest number of patents in the field of information technology, followed by TCS, Wipro, IIT and HCL Technologies.

On the other hand, US-based Qualcomm topped the chart of 10 foreign companies that filed the maximum number of patent applications in India during 2015-16, at 1,884, followed by electronics, health care and lighting major Koninklijke Philips NV (949) and Samsung Electronics (905).

On the global stage however, India's IPR norms have repeatedly been criticised by the United States with the nation remaining on the Priority Watch List in the 2016 Special 301 Report by the United States Trade Representative (USTR) earlier this month.

The US also continues to monitor India's application of its compulsory licensing law. It has been pushing India to make any changes on controversial laws such as Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act, which is a prime demand of multinational pharmaceutical companies. Section 3(d) discourages patents being granted for incremental innovations.

"India's sovereign space is very well laid out." Sitharaman said on this note.

India is a signatory to the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and changed its patents legislation in 2005 moving from a process patent regime to a product patent one.

The government has reiterated that it is not ready to engage with anyone on 'TRIPS plus' issues which could lead to ever-greening of patents or blocking of compulsory licences."