India lags behind in applications for patents: Prez

Countries like China, Japan and the United States registered lakhs of patents, whereas only a few thousand patents were registered by Indians, he said.

Mukherjee was addressing in Bengali the students and teachers of the Vidyanagar College here, where he himself had once taught for five years from 1963.

Suggesting that Indians should do more, he cited examples of C V Raman, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Hargobind Khurana and said the country has produced a "galaxy of scientists" who carried out important research and inventions while working here.

Earlier too, Mukherjee has voiced concern over the country lagging behind in applying for patents and pointed out that the total number of patent applications filed by Indians in 2010 was around 6,000 which was only 0.30 per cent of the total applications filed in the world.

"....It pales in comparison to over 3 lakh applications by Chinese, around 1.7 lakh by Germans, 4.64 lakh by Japanese and 4.2 lakh by Americans," the President had said last month.

Referring to a gap in the country's education system, Mukherjee said while there were thousands of schools which taught children to be eligible for higher education, the number of universities was less.