Will ensure patents are given within 18 months of application: Amitabh Kant

At the Make in India event, the DIPP secretary said some of this work will be outsourced to the IITs

Filing and getting approvals for patents is all set to become more easier and quicker, with approvals coming in as early as 18 months. Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) secretary Amitabh Kant, who was speaking at the industry-academia symposium at the Make in India week, said this will be enabled within one year.

“We will also outsource some of this work to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Apart from that, we are also hiring few hundred officers to inspect new patent applications and approve them quickly,” said Kant.

At the event hosted by Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion, Government of India, in collaboration with the Government of Maharashtra and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), academic heads of engineering institutes also said that more tie-ups between industry and institutes is necessary.

Devang Khakhar, director of IIT Bombay, said that several new opportunities for innovation and research and they have several such tie-ups for this. “The focus is now on manufacturing. The growth potential is high and this can be supported by industry-academia collaboration,” he added.

The panelists also emphasised on the need to re-orient the engineering syllabus to bring it on par with the industry needs and make it more practical.

“We need to ensure that we create the right incubation centres in the engineering colleges and link them up with the industry,” he said.

Kant said that technology has to be a critical player, where convergence and integration of manufacturing with technology would be key.

 
Companies are already involved in this process, and have begun to engage with academia across all educational institutes’ levels.
 
Pratyush Kumar, president, Boeing India said that they are working with high school stduents to get them interested in aerospace. They also have the aeromodelling competition to encourage innovation in this space.
 
The Boeing National Aeromodelling Competition for college students in India is sponsored by Boeing, and conducted in collaboration with all major IITs. Logistics support for this event is provided by AerotriX.
 
This was launched with the vision to provide a unified national platform for students interested in aerospace and related engineering disciplines - to demonstrate their aero-modeling expertise.